


A Taper in a Rushing Wind

by paperbirds (bofurrific)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Asexual Character, Body Horror, Canon Suicide, Character Death, Gen, Lyrium Addiction, Lyrium Withdrawal, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, One-Sided Relationship, Platonic Relationships, Rite of Tranquility, Samson is ace af and in love with Maddox, both minor and major - Freeform, i don't make the rules, this was my nano this year and I apologize in advance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-09 05:51:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 51,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12881511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bofurrific/pseuds/paperbirds
Summary: Samson gives Maddox fives kisses.





	1. Kiss on the Cheek

**Author's Note:**

  * For [em_gnat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/em_gnat/gifts).



> Everything is em_gnat's fault okay. 
> 
> This was supposed to just be five kisses but it turned into Samson's life story so.... my bad?

Raleigh Samson never actually wanted to be a Templar. The robes were ridiculous and the restrictions placed upon them were unreasonable. No relationships, no love or sex or families, no contact with the outside world. A lifetime of servitude babysitting little magelings and would-be maleficarum. And for what? Bottles of blue liquified rocks for the rest of his life?

No, Raleigh never wanted to be a Templar. But his village was poor and career choices were few. His ma did her best but when another mouth came screaming into the world and not enough food to fill it, Raleigh did his duty. He kissed his sisters and brothers, crying and begging him to not go,and his ma, damp-eyed but dry-faced and stoic, goodbye and set out for the Chantry.

It was nothing like he imagined. Those little blue bottles took a little while to take hold but once they had their little poison teeth in him he was soaring, hands twitching too early for another dose. And the magelings… No one had ever looked at Raleigh with fear and unlike his power-hungry fellows, it stirred nothing but unsettling in his gut even the Lyrium couldn’t soothe. 

Knight-Commander Guylian took a shine to Raleigh, poor and hardworking and never causing more trouble than a raucous laugh at mealtimes, and in no time he was being handed a shimmering Sunburst shield by the Knight-Commander himself. It was more than a near street rat like him could have imagined and the pride swelled thick in his chest when he took the knee before his Commander and gave his solemn vows. Raleigh Samson became something that day. 

But the mages shied away from him, shining and new and threatening, though he never offered them anything but a smile and as genuine a greeting as one could give a quivering set of robes and magic. He’d seen others in the Order treat their charges with rough hands and threats and doubled down on his efforts to appear to the magelings as nonthreatening and kind as possible, offering an extra apple or sweet to a young boy struggling with his studies, or a vote of confidence for the girl facing her Harrowing in a fortnight who tried to spend the entire day in the library without meals or rest. 

Little favors, enough to bring the barest hint of a smile to the mages’ faces. Until one followed him hesitantly into a dimly lit corner after his latest favor. The mage had big dark eyes and thin quick fingers as he knelt between Raleigh’s legs, hands shaking as they reached for his armor and Raleigh had panicked, shoving him back, the mageling falling to the floor and cowering in terror. 

The mages paid for scraps of kindness, he explained when both mage and Templar had regained their breath, in one way or another. And though Raleigh had seen awful things in his short time guarding the Gallows halls, it still rocked him to his core; this boy on his knees to repay the kindness of an extra piece of bread with his dinner. The Sunburst shield burned then at his back and he found himself wanting to cast it from the high tower. 

Raleigh made it clear then, ordered in a shaking voice that the mageling was to spread the word: he would never demand payment of this nature, of any nature really, for the little favors he offered. He wanted to ask the names of the Templars breaking their vows and pushing mages into dark corners and onto their knees but he didn’t think he could handle the answers once they were given. Couldn’t look his friends in the eyes knowing their handprint bruises were painted on a mageling’s skin. 

Things got worse. Knight-Commander Guylian was hanged and his seat filled by the colder and crueler Meredith Stannard. Meredith, who looked at the mages like she could already see the demons that plagued them, who kept her hand on the hilt of her sword at all times when prowling the halls; a constant threat that made the mages shrink and quake when her shadow cast them in darkness. She kept names of Templars she found to be unsuited for the job, Templars with a hint of softness in them, a spark of sympathy and Raleigh knew he was heading the list despite his efforts to keep this after-hours activity of his hidden from his fellow Templars and his trust in the mages to keep their mouths shut even if forcefully questioned. No one had to tell Meredith, no one had to be indiscreet, she just  _knew_  these things even if she didn’t have the evidence to throw him out. She needed far less proof to punish the mages - _his_ mages as he tried not to think of them as and often failed- and so the utmost care was needed to keep them, all of them, safe from her long-reaching fingers and Lyrium brands.

It only made him work harder to bring smiles to the gaunt faces, lined so with stress and fear that a twitch of the lips, a murmured thanks, reminded Raleigh why he had set out to do this in the first place. And the Lyrium bottles that found their way into his hands when he finished little tasks and favors certainly didn’t hurt. They had warned him, the older Templars, that the longer he was in the order, the longer he drank desperately from the little Chalice the Reverend Mother brandished like the Chantry’s own barbed leash, the more he would crave it. Now it seemed only an hour or so into the morning his hands would twitch and his ribs ache for another sweet sip of the Blue, for the wave of calm and bliss to wash over him, soothe little pains he didn’t know were there and take his mind far from the destruction and corruption of every day. 

But he never accepted anything more from the mages and they learned quickly from their mageling friends not to offer themselves on a silver platter. And when he heard of his colleagues, though he was loathe to admit connection to beasts of that nature, like Otto Alrik, who preferred his mages Tranquil, all fight gone out of them and the word “no” stolen from their lips, Raleigh would make sure to be present whenever Alrik was set to be alone with them as often as he could.   


**__________**

 

Mages came and went in little packs and Raleigh tried not to get too attached to any one. They were constantly traded in and out between the Circles like the slaves they were, a commodity passing hands and crossing borders. Few of the mages in The Gallows had actually been born in Kirkwall, chained and shipped off from across The Waking Sea or the great plains and mountains of the Free Marches.  

There were suicides too, more often than Raleigh liked to think about. Immolations. Defenestrations. He’d seen the bodies, helped clean them up. Burnt and broken and bleeding. Most of them were kids or just older. Many of the Templars would sneer at the mourning mages and make their jokes. _The only good mage is a dead one_ , and other cruel suggestions that they follow suit. If Raleigh were a better man he might have told those Templars to get fucked or at least to have a shred of respect, but he wasn’t a better man and the most he could offer was more of his little favors, walking on eggshells around the terrified and anguished magelings.

So it was better not to get attached. He helped where he could, where it wouldn’t get him into too much trouble if that damned Meredith found out. He’d been accused several times of being too soft on the mages, of coddling them. But there was no evidence to get him anything more than little slaps on the wrist and a look of disdain and disgust when he crossed paths with the Knight-Commander. It was worth it to see them smile, and to know he had the gratitude of the First Enchanter. Raleigh had always liked to feel needed. And that was the real reason he helped the little magelings. The thin Lyrium vials sweetened the deal, the soft twitch of lips lifted his ever-leadening heart, but knowing they needed him, that he was giving the mages something no one else could –or would- offer was what kept Raleigh coming back despite the danger to himself and to them.

A new wave of mages was brought in with the morning sun and Raleigh watched them as they were marched past the massive statues of tortured slaves. Meredith always demanded that new mages were brought in that way so they would have to look up and see their fate; most of them came weeping and terrified or silent and dead-eyed. It was better that way, that they knew already what their short lives would be like in such a prison. Better for him not to have to watch the brightness fade from their eyes, the weight added to their steps.

But there was always one: some stupid kid whose parents had never warned them properly what it truly meant to bear the Maker's Curse or those coming from Circle Towers headed by Knight Commanders kinder than Meredith; ones where Templars didn't take advantage of their power and drag the magelings in their care into dark corners for darker deeds. A myth, perhaps, but Raleigh wanted to believe they existed somewhere, that the Kirkwall Gallows was the exception, not the rule. 

The stupid bright-eyed kid in the group that arrived that morning was tall and moved like the height had sprung up on him recently and he hadn't the time to grow into it. He had a kind, narrow face and expressive brown eyes, and though he didn't read as excited -smart enough at least to know better than that- the boy wasn’t as afraid as he should have been, curiosity thrumming in every motion. The boy caught Raleigh’s eye and a half smile, awkward and tentative, tugged at the corner of his lips. And though Raleigh wanted to shake his head in disgust, he found himself giving the kid a nod in return. 

The boy’s name was Maddox. He wasn’t as chatty at Raleigh had expected him to be, but he was friendly and offered up the information easily when Raleigh prodded, against his better instincts. The son of sword smiths who had come to Kirkwall’s Lowtown in the last year or so, his magic had come much later than most of the magelings who showed up at the Circle of Magi still clinging to their mother’s skirts and cowering behind them.He wasn’t Harrowed just yet and laughingly told Raleigh, as he was led to his quarters, that they may as well put his cot in the library for all he studying he would need to do to catch up. 

Raleigh would see Maddox in the library nearly as often as he had said, but sometimes he would catch the young mage looking out the tall windows, kind face wistful, and Raleigh would find himself struck silent and still by the light on the planes of his face, the shadows on his skin. He would shake himself off the moment Maddox’s features released him, eyes closing to curse himself and his stupidity. Maddox was just another mage; he’d seen them before, all bubbly and bright; this sword smith’s son wasn’t special. But when the boy’s Harrowing came about he still spent an hour in the Chantry praying that he wouldn’t be the one assigned to keep watch and then two hours once more that the boy was strong enough to withstand the temptation of the demons. 

“You didn’t tell me The Gallows had a smithy, Knight-Templar Samson!” 

Raleigh wanted to reprimand Maddox for his cheek but the breath caught in his chest, a thrill fluttering there in his ribs that Maddox had indeed passed his Harrowing. The First Enchanter must have told him about the smithy as a reward for his achievement. The mageling -proper mage now, he supposed- had appeared at Raleigh’s side out of nowhere and if it had been anyone else, he’d have received a gentle cuff on the ear for the surprise and the tone of voice. But Maddox was glowing and Raleigh could do nothing but take him in.

It took a moment -or several moments too long- for Raleigh to find his words again and a film of awkwardness had settled over them as he gave a rough laugh and offered up that he hadn’t wanted to distract Maddox from his studies. And he did give the boy a gentle shove to the shoulder at the fakely skeptical look he was given in return before it melted away and the mage was stepping closer to him.

“Thank you,” Maddox murmured, voice dropping to low tones to avoid being overheard by Templars and mages passing by. “for looking out for me. For your kindness.” And at the quizzical look Raleigh knew to be on his own face, the boy continued, “not everyone here is kind. I truly appreciate that you are.” He didn’t look Raleigh in the eye, turning to look around the smithing tent and pretending to be more enamored with it than embarrassed of the conversation.

The words set a familiar fire to Raleigh’s veins, his rage at the Templar treatment of their mage charges, burning hotter and closer to his skin than before at the thought of Maddox being on the receiving end of any of it. He said the boy’s name and was ignored, watched the lump stick in Maddox’s throat as the mage swallowed thickly. Reaching out, he wrapped his fingers around Maddox’s thin wrist and held firm, repeating his name until the kid was forced to look at him. 

“If anyone bothers you, come find me. Anyone at all and I’ll deal with them.” It wasn’t an offer he often made to the magelings. While he tried to make it more difficult for Templars to abuse the mages by being present and outspoken against the treatment, there was little he could do to stop a particularly stubborn and cruel Templar but with fists and sword. But for Maddox, a mage too kind and hopeful for his own good… For Maddox he would. 

**__________**

 

Saturday evenings when neither of them had rounds always found Raleigh at the Hanged Man with Thrask, an old friend who had begun his Templar training a few short years before Raleigh joined the order. Their shared disgust for their crueler colleagues’ ideas of fun had brought them together and growing bitterness over the years since Meredith had taken control of the Gallows had sealed their friendship. When they were young recruits they had managed to sneak out of their quarters on the weekends to try their hands at gambling in the rundown tavern that always achieved the look of a bar about to close down and yet was somehow still up and running and ready for them the next week.

A handful of times Thrask had tempted Raleigh to join him at The Blooming Rose, a brothel in Hightown far out of Raleigh’s price range or interest and one specifically off-limits to Templars to the point of being randomly raided by Meredith herself to drag unsuspecting Templars out by their ears in skivvies or less if they were truly unlucky. Thrask would bribe him with a few pints of ale so he could flirt with his sweetheart, Ambra, while Raleigh awkwardly made small talk with the ladies in the parlor. 

Sex was fine and Raleigh indulged rarely, mostly to get people from prying into his life, but he’d never understood the fervor with which his fellows pursued it. It was a release, a companionable physical closeness. He could achieve that with more ease and less coin, and less chance of being thrown into a puddle by a flushed and glowering Knight Commander without all the mess and greedy rush of it. 

Thrask maintained however, in more detail than Raleigh preferred to ever have, that his relationship with Ambra went far beyond the physical pleasures of their bodies and that no coin needed to exchange hands when he went to see her. They were in _love_ , a concept almost as foreign to Raleigh as sex. He believed in it sure, from the stories he told his brothers and sisters growing up, from the couples clinging to one another as one or both were dragged off to the Gallows or ripped apart to separate Circles Towers. Love, Thrask had drunkenly lectured him one evening when he had expressed skepticism of strength of Ambra’s love depending on the quality of Thrask’s person and not the depth of his pocket, was the Maker’s Grace, and it wasn’t his fault that no Grace of the Maker had ever touched Raleigh. 

They hadn’t spoken for weeks after that, Raleigh bitter and hurt that Thrask thought he was incapable or undeserving of love and Thrask still seething over Raleigh’s doubt of the validity of his and Ambra’s love just because she worked in the brothel and serviced others who could pay her. The standoff only ended when they both caught a new recruit with a bad attitude cornering a Tranquil with a hand under her robes and a sneer on his greedy face. Samson punched the piece of shit in the jaw, knocking him to the ground, and Thrask hauled him up by his own robes and threw him bodily from the mage, who thanked them both in the quiet and level way the Tranquil had of speaking before turning silently away and going back to her quarters. Any argument then dissipated as they marched the recruit straight the Knight-Commander’s office and since then nothing else had threatened their bond.

On this particular night, the Hanged Man was especially empty and the two old friends sat, thumbing their worn playing cards and listening to the rare rainfall outside. Thrask had a look on his face that said he was about to lecture Raleigh again and he tried to stave it off by bluffing a shit hand, knowing Thrask knew his tells as well as he knew the older man’s. Thrask, knowing what he was trying to prevent, gave a heaving and overdramatic sigh and called for two more ales to be brought over, payment for the annoyance he was about to bring his friend. 

“You’re getting too attached, Raleigh,” the older Templar said with a sigh as he watched the younger man splash ale foam down the front of his uniform. And Raleigh pretended not to know what he was referring to, the mages, the Lyrium, Thrask himself. He listed them off on his fingers, taking small delight in the shared irritation that crossed Thrask’s face at his refusal to acknowledge his problems with all of the above, but with one mage in particular: the kind-faced smith with an easy smile and dark brown eyes that danced in the sun.

Thrask had no room to talk about attachment and Raleigh pointed it out, asking in a waspish tone how the older man’s daughter was doing, which only resulted in Thrask throwing his cards at him in exasperation although there was no one around to overhear, no around to find out about his and Ambra’s mage daughter, Olivia. Thrask would protect her from the Circles like any father would in his position. People who only knew of the Circles by reputation often did everything to hide their Maker-Cursed children and prevent them from being dragged off to a life of solitude and servitude. Thrask knew acutely all the terrible things that could -and _would_ \- befall his beloved daughter if ever she were found out and so he and Ambra had vowed to keep her, keep their Olivia, secret and safe. 

It was hypocritical of Thrask to even suggest Raleigh watch himself and his involvement with the mages. Most of the time he had been protecting them, Thrask had been at his side, cutting a thicker and more imposing figure with the added bonus of the fatherly face of disappointment to shame the sick recruits who dared overstep bounds. 

“I’m just protecting him,” Raleigh muttered into his mug before draining it of ale and throwing his cards, another shit hand, onto the table in a fold. “There’s nothin’ else going on. ‘m not _you_.” Not governed by his dick he meant, though Thrask took no offense to his prickly friend’s clumsy and unwitty barbs.But it was true. He hadn’t offered any favors to Maddox yet besides his protection and Maddox hadn’t asked anything of him. He strayed by the smithy too often during his shift he knew. Often enough that Thrask had noticed and probably the hawk-eyed Cullen Rutherford who had made it clear when they had roomed together on the boy’s first few weeks after his transfer, that he didn’t approve of Samson’s trust and rapport with their mage charges. 

Rutherford was close to the Knight-Commander, sharing her more violent views on how to deal with the mages, though Samson supposed he had good reason, having listened to the kid’s night terrors those early weeks, woken to find Rutherford a sweat-slick and trembling ball of cloth and prayer on his cot. Though Raleigh had never seen the Knight-Lieutenant lash out at the mages, it seemed Rutherford kept his distance as much as possible and supported the Knight-Commander’s increasingly cruel and unstable motions with a blind devotion that made Raleigh sick to his stomach. 

Despite his assurances that there was nothing to worry about, Thrask still warned Raleigh to be safe and Raleigh had to admit that the more people who noticed his interest in Maddox, innocent as it may be,the more danger they both were in. He conceded the point with a grumble and a rude hand gesture that Thrask waved off with a laugh and they finished their drinks before heading back through the misting rain to the Templar quarters before curfew was called. 

**__________**

 

As it turned out Raleigh had no choice but to avoid Maddox when he awoke several mornings later completely immobile. Pain radiated through his core, the ache in him a thirst that made him want to scream. His skin felt bruised, hell his _bones_ felt bruised and jagged, like they were scraping his muscles raw from the inside out and it was all he could do to whine and press his head further into the blankets to block out the stinging light, biting his lip to keep the roiling nausea at bay and his sheets clean of sick.

It happened that way sometimes, the Lyrium. The sweet blue drug the Chantry doled out to its faithful soldiers that took away the nightmares and the fear that came along with heir duty and in its place left strength and power. What the Chantry didn’t tell the Templars until they were already in too deep to really care or even to notice, was that for their power and fearlessness they were trading in their autonomy and sanity. 

A few years into his service Raleigh had started to feel it; the pain that sometimes sparked in his bones before their morning Lyrium dose was coming earlier and earlier, like the Lyrium wasn’t doing its job anymore. The nightmares too, so much worse than before the Order, came rushing back to him in waves that had left him crying out into the night. He only knew he needed _more_ of the Lyrium to keep that pain, that terror, at bay. 

It wasn’t uncommon to build up a slight tolerance to the drug; Raleigh had always heard that the Templars who had been in service decades longer received much larger rations and more often throughout the day and night. Even those Templars who survived long enough to retire were sent vials to keep them calm and pain-free as they lived out their last days. But no one had heard of the tolerance building as early as it had with him. He had jokingly called himself special, though others had their own ideas of what it made him. 

_Weak_ and _addicted_ the Knight-Commander had sneered, like any of the Templars, like she herself were truly any different. If any of them were caught on a mission that took them too far from the Tower for too long, the pain and the nightmares would creep back into their blood. He wasn’t _weak_ and they were _all_ addicted. Things conveniently left out of the training provided to the new recruits when given their Sunburst shields and first shining taste of Lyrium. 

The worst part was how little he cared that they had lied and tricked him. He just wanted more and more until the pain faded. Until the world faded and he could drift through the slippery thickness of unreality for another few hours. The Lyrium took his autonomy and in the end would take his mind, leave him drug-addled and crazed and Raleigh didn’t care a single bit as long as he could still get another cup, another vial, another drop on his tongue. 

But days would still come when the pain was so strong he couldn’t lift his head let alone his legs to leave the relative safety of his blankets. Even their gentle weight suddenly pressing down on a him like a golem on his chest until he could barely draw breath and the firm cot beneath him could have been sandpaper ripping at his skin and digging out his spine. 

When the pain like this would hit, Thrask usually came to find him, extra vials in hand and the gentlest of cool touches that still made Raleigh flinch and whimper until the shimmering blue was sliding down his throat and settling in his marrow and he could move again. Those days were coming more and more frequently with stronger reactions every time. It worried Thrask, older than Raleigh and longer in the Order, if the severity of Raleigh’s reactions would be his own fate as well, in time, or if his friend was truly different. Weak, he wondered privately, like the Knight-Commander said, and then berated himself for ever agreeing with that witch, for ever doubting Samson. 

The pain was bad enough that morning, compounded no doubt by the rare break of hot and humid weather to rush in a damp cold front that ached in ways none of the Marchers were accustomed to, that even with the Lyrium dose brought by Thrask, Raleigh was reluctant to try and leave the bed, stomach still rolling in an unpleasantly threatening manner and head spinning. And Thrask, ever the father though Samson was not even five years his junior, rested a hand on his temple and told him to take the morning off to get more sleep. Samson was in no condition to argue, eager to slip back into the quiet and painless land of dreamless sleep aided by the shimmering blue. 

Raleigh slipped in and out of sleep for the next day or so, usually only waking long enough to down another vial of Lyrium before rolling back into his blankets. When Raleigh woke again the sun was high and the Lyrium song was thrumming gently in his veins, the pain having faded to something much more manageable. Someone, Thrask or Keran, or the newest kid, a boy of nine named Wystan, had left a plate on the little table at his bedside full of fruit and sandwiches. He had certainly missed enough mealtimes for his body to let him know, hunger biting at his stomach beneath the calming wave of the Lyrium and he took the time to shovel the food down his throat before forcing himself out of bed and into his uniform.

 

There was unlikely to be much in the way of consequences for missing a few days of duty beyond a mild scolding from Knight-Lieutenant Rutherford and another knock against his name in the books of Meredith. It wasn't uncommon as the Templars got older and the Lyrium took deeper root in their bones and though the higher ranked Templars might have looked down upon Raleigh and his apparent weakness, it was not a punishable offense.

 

What Raleigh wasn't expecting when he trudged down the hall was for the bright-eyed Maddox to come rushing out of the smithy to greet him. He at least knew better than to fling himself at Raleigh in a hug, though from the twitch of his arms and the halting way he stopped abruptly before him, it seemed that he had been considering it. 

 

“Knight-Templar Samson!” The boy greeted, his body going slack with relief as he took Raleigh in. “Your friend said you were feeling ill, I’m glad to see you back on your feet!” He bounced on the balls of his feet, ignoring the way Raleigh was looking uneasily to the left and right at the mages and, more importantly, the other Templar Knights, who were overhearing them. Maddox knew there were unkind Templars but he didn’t know enough to be afraid of his friendship with Raleigh and what it could cost them. 

 

Raleigh tried to play it off, with a coarse laugh forced from his lips and a directionless wave of his hand. “Not getting rid of me so easy, Mage.” He said in a gruff tone that gave Maddox pause. The kid too glanced around, more subtle than he’d been before, and nodded. He got the message and Raleigh returned the nod and told him to get back to work so he could report to Rutherford and have his ears talked off for missing his rounds. 

 

**__________**

 

If Raleigh avoided the smithy for a week or so more, no one said anything about it. He sent Thrask to check on Maddox to be sure he wasn’t being bothered by any of their more cruel brothers in arms, but Thrask always returned to him reporting the mage to be hard working and as happy as one could expect him to be, locked in a tower for the rest of his life. A little less lively, Thrask admitted when Raleigh pressed him further, without his friend to greet him each day, and Raleigh tried to ignore the weight that leadened in his chest at the words. He didn’t want to hurt Maddox as much as he wanted to protect him. Protect them both. 

 

But Fate would push Raleigh back into Maddox’s tent when the joint on his gauntlet snapped off and he was sent to the smithy for repairs. The mage’s face lit up though he was otherwise calm and controlled in his greeting. Raleigh took a moment to really look around the tent at the things Maddox had created, intricate daggers and sword hilts better crafted than many Raleigh had seen in Hightown. He told Maddox as much and the mage blushed and rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. 

 

“Knight-Lieutenant Rutherford says it’s a shame I ended up a mage.” The boy laughed to himself. “He says I could have lead a lucrative life making weapons or armor in Kirkwall.” He shrugged again at the frown crossing Raleigh’s face. “I like to fix things. I can do it well enough here.” Meeting Raleigh’s gaze and holding it, he reached to take the broken gauntlet from Raleigh’s hands. “I can keep your armor strong and your weapons sharp. If I can keep you, all of you, safer, then that’s okay with me.” 

 

Raleigh was too stunned to respond, watching the grin spread across Maddox’ face as he examined the broken joint, already knowing how to bend the metal to his will to fix it. The joy was a good look on his young face, Raleigh decided, and he left the tent feeling oddly dumbstruck, with Maddox’s promise to have the gauntlet repaired and in ship shape by the next morning. He found himself doubling back, found himself wanting to watch the mage work, wanting one more word with him.

 

“Maddox?” The boy turned to him, a faint surprise lighting his face to see Raleigh again. He’d made it obvious that they couldn’t spend too much time together he knew, but he couldn’t leave with saying it. “If you ever need a favor…Anything at all, you just let me know, all right?” Something crossed the younger mage’s face for a moment, something soft and sad and contemplative, and he nodded, thanking Raleigh as he returned to his work. Raleigh stayed for a quarter of an hour, three quarters of an hour and beyond, losing track of time watching the mage craft. He lost himself with the ring of Maddox’s anvil and the sizzle of hot metal hitting the cool water, the precision with which the young mage did everything, before he forced himself away and back to his duties. 

 

When Raleigh returned the following morning the gauntlet was as good as new just as Maddox had promised, sitting shining on the worktable. Samson stood still as Maddox fitted it to his wrist and snapped the new latch in place with a pleased sound at his success. He kept ahold of Raleigh’s arm longer than need be, shifting and looking somewhat uncomfortable, an expression that didn’t fit his kind face, the hesitation and rawness of it rubbing at Raleigh’s chest like a sander over stone. before checking just outside the tent be sure they were truly alone. 

 

Before Raleigh could ask what was wrong, Maddox was drawing a small roll of letters from inside his robes. His face was pink, even his ears flushing red with shyness. “They’re for my girl,” he murmured, voice low enough that Samson had to bend to hear him, eyes stuck on those letters, knowing they each bore Maddox’s happiness and his trust and his love. One of them was folded carefully into a paper bird, wings spread for the skies. “I write every week but I don’t have a way of getting them out to her. She doesn’t even know if I’m still alive or if I’m safe or happy…. I just want to let her know I’m here and I-” Here he stopped himself, took a shaky breath, and sighed. “That I love her.” The boy swallowed. He knew what he was asking. “She’s out in Kirkwall. Her name is Mea.” 

 

It was more dangerous by far than anything he’d ever done for the mages before. He should have said no. He should have told Maddox to burn those letters and forget about some girl who would be forgetting him soon, if she hadn’t already. Circle Mages didn’t get to be in love. They lived in captivity, tried to avoid the Lyrium brand, and then they died. Raleigh should have been cold and honest if he really wanted to do the kid a favor. But Maddox’s face when said her name, glowing like the mere thought of her lit him from within. “ _Mea_.” It filled him with an ache he couldn’t name, a loss he’d never felt. 

 

Maddox was still talking quietly, telling him where Mea worked, in a flower shop -because of course Maddox would fall in love with a girl who grew bright flowers and smiled like the sun- in the Lowtown market not far from the Hanged Man tavern. Telling him about watching the birds fly from his window and wishing he could send one to see her, one to carry her his love, -here he unfolded the paper bird to shyly show what he had written there, _“I love you, always. Your Maddox”_ between the bird’s wings where its heart would be- and Samson was lost. He reached for the sheaf of letters, for the paper bird caught in flight, and let himself fall. 

 

**__________**

 

Finding Mea was easy enough. Raleigh hadn’t actually known there was a flower shop in Lowtown. With so many starving on the streets it was hard to imagine anyone south of Hightown had the money to spare for some colorful weeds. Money in Lowtown usually went to your vices first and necessities second, but there in the corner of the market was a quaint little stand half full of soft petals and wide blooms and every once in awhile someone stopped, a man looking to apologize to his sweetheart, a child to surprise her mother, to drop a few coins in exchange for a bundle. 

 

Raleigh stood in the shadows and watched the girl running the shop, Maddox’s Mea. She was as bright as he could have imagined the kind of girl Maddox would fall in love with, a genuine and never-ending smile blossoming across her face not unlike the flowers she was tending. She laughed like a peal of bells when a customer made a joke and Raleigh suddenly had a flash of what Maddox’s life could have been like if he hadn’t been born a mage, if they lived in a different world where he wasn’t treated like a wolf among sheep. 

 

He saw Maddox kissing this sweet girl farewell in the mornings as he made his way to the Hightown market to sell his wares, brilliant decorated sword hilts and daggers, shining armor and shields. He would keep her flowers on the corner of his stand and tell those who visited that they would find no better blossoms than with his girl, Mea. He saw Maddox going home to her every night, a modest and happy home of love and laughter and light. Maybe even a child or two, to cling to Maddox’s hip and watch with his wide expressive eyes in their young faces as he crafted for them little metal toys.

 

They took everything from the mages, the Templars. Their humanity, their identity, their magic, their dreams and hopes and their consent. Their lives. Raleigh knew there were much worse things they did to the mages than deny them the ability to fall in love and be married. To have the quiet and gentle life they sometimes deserved. It wasn’t an aspect of captivity he had often focussed on given what he had seen. But now, looking at the sweet gardener with a kind face and kinder heart hand out a single flower to a filthy street rat who hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her stand for several minutes, it struck him the cruelty of it, that Maddox, who deserved a good life more than nearly anyone else Raleigh and ever known, would never see his girl again. The only thing he had of her now was the sheaf of letters tucked inside Raleigh’s undershirt, close to his heart. 

 

Finding Mea had been one thing but approaching her proved to be another altogether. Raleigh wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t the bravest or the best knight but he wasn’t a fucking coward. It still took two pints of ale from the Hanged Man and three hours of staring in the shadows like a fucking cretin to work up the nerve to march himself over to the little stand as the sun was beginning its long descent beneath the city’s skyline, casting the marketplace in softer light. 

 

“Have you finally decided to come out of the shadows, Ser Knight?” Mea greeted Raleigh before he had a chance to open his mouth and address her. “You must have done something awfully wrong to your girl if you’re that nervous about even approaching a flower stand. Worried they won’t be enough to assuage her anger? I can do my best but I don’t work miracles for the Maker.” The girl was grinning, a flashing glint unlike the warm smile Raleigh had seen her give every other customer to visit her stand. 

 

She was afraid, he realized, and covering it up with cheek. He was a Templar, imposing in his armor, and she was aware he’d been watching her for half the afternoon. A Templar like the ones who took away her love. He didn’t blame her for the cheek though he was slightly surprised by it -though given his own friendship with Maddox it shouldn’t have come as a shock that the boy chose his friends and lovers with a little impertinence. There wasn’t anything he could do to assuage that fear, not really, so he simply drew the letters from his breast pocket and placed them silently on the table. 

 

Bright eyes flickered between him and the letters, hands scrambling forward, no room in her fluttering heart for doubt, the words stuttering from her no-longer smirking lips. “Is this? Are they from?” She couldn’t finish her sentences, clutching the letters to her breast and staring at Raleigh with a hope and heartbreak on her face so clear he had to look away. 

 

“From a mutual friend,” he muttered, the most confirmation he was willing to provide, giving her a short nod. She understood, thank the Maker, the clever girl, and quickly pocketed the letters except for the paper bird which she held in tender fingers, glistening eyes spilling over.He gave Mea a moment to compose herself, dashing at her eyes with the heal of her palm and cursing herself an overemotional fool. She asked him to come back in a day or so for her replies and he hesitated just long enough to break the girl’s heart all over again. And he couldn’t refuse, not when she was looking at him like that and cradling Maddox’s little paper bird to her heart like her heartbeat could give its wings flight. 

 

Maddox’s girl handed him a flower for his trouble and he should have pitched it the moment he was out of her sight, another piece evidence of his betrayal of the order, of the guarded heart beating in his chest. Instead he tucked it under Maddox’s pillow while the boy was out and it was his turn to check the mages’ quarters for contraband. The irony of leaving some himself was not lost on Raleigh, but it was the end of the evening and the mages would be locked into their rooms soon where Maddox could be alone. 

 

True to his word, Raleigh showed up at Mea’s flower stand, early in the morning this time, having given his fellow Templars the excuse that he wanted to get in a brisk morning walk in the sharpness of the morning air before he was stuck on duty in the Harrowing Chamber later that afternoon. No one gave a sign of disbelief or protest -most of them hated being remanded to Harrowing duty whether they like or hated the mages or didn’t give a damn either way, enough so that on more than one occasion a Templar had been excused from duty for having a few too many drinks beforehand to settle their nerves. 

 

Mea was waiting for him in all her glowing glory and she looked so relieved and surprised to find him at her shop that she almost dropped the letters as she passed them to him with fingers that shook. He declined a second flower, too risky even given all the risk he was putting himself and Maddox in. He didn’t give Mea a promise of when -and if- he would return but if she noticed his silence she let is pass uninterrupted, waving him off with a barely breathed rush of her gratitude.He nodded, throat sticking oddly and no words willing to pass his lips, and turned to go. 

 

Sliding the letters under Maddox’s pillow as he had with Mea’s flower would have been far too risky, but so was keeping them on his person or allowing Maddox to keep them tucked away under his shirt. He waited as patiently as he could, the contraband letters burning a hole against his skin where the rested against his chest until the mages were to be escorted back to their rooms and locked away. It was Cinna who had the the duty of taking Maddox and some of the other mages with crafting skills back to their halls that night but Raleigh told her to run along and get supper early and he could handle the bunch. She was too grateful and hungry to question why.And when they arrived at Maddox’s door he carefully placed the letters in the boy’s eager and expectant hands, hushing the rush of thanks that left his lips and made the boy swear he would burn the letters the next morning in the fires of the smithy no matter how much he wanted to save his sweetheart’s words.

 

Avoiding Maddox in the days that followed was easier than Raleigh expected it to be. It was strange but he felt more like a person than he had even before. Before, he had been this pleasant mage who was bright and warm and Raleigh’s friend, if a Templar could dare call a mage a friend. Now, after meeting Mea and holding their love for one another in pieces of paper against his chest… Now Maddox was a real person to other people other than himself. His determination to keep the sweethearts connected and in love grew deep roots, tangling around his organs and squeezing his insides tight whenever the hesitation would build up, the worry. And he would take the next sheaf of letters. 

 

Routine was the enemy, Raleigh knew. Routine made him vulnerable and twice as likely to get caught. He accepted Maddox’s letters in the smithy, in the mage’s quarters, once in the Chantry while they were kneeling side by side to pray. He visited Mea’s flower shop at alternating times, when he had rounds in the city or after his shift ended inside, coming to or from the Hanged Man where he played his cards and drank his ale with Thrask every Saturday. He no longer has a large stack to hide in his undershirt but a letter or two, always accompanied by a carefully folded paper bird to carry Maddox’s love for his sweetheart. 

 

The next Saturday evening Raleigh’s game with Thrask was especially silent. The older Templar spent most of the night staring at Raleigh over his cards. Thrask wanted to lecture him, Raleigh knew, wanted to tell him what a Maker-damned fool he was for not listening. For not being careful. But Raleigh studiously ignored the heavy sighs and pointed looks until Thrask gave up and muttered that he hoped it was all worth it as he threw down his hand and waved for more drinks. To tell the truth, Raleigh hoped so too. But every time doubt would find its way into his mind or his heart, Maddox’s face, warm and kind and alight with love and trust, would appear instead and he would picture that face falling, crumpling in disappointment and heartbreak. He would imagine losing the young mage as a friend. Becoming just another torment in that damned prison of a circle tower, and his resolve would harden. 

 

**__________**

 

“You’re getting too friendly with that mage,” Knight-Lieutenant Rutherford began by way of introduction one morning when Raleigh passed him in the hall. Raleigh was already in a shit mood having had to attend a failed Harrowing the night before, losing sleep over the fresh blood he had scrubbed from his sword and from the pained looks he’d been receiving all morning from the mages in the mess hall. 

 

“Which mage, Rutherford?” He snapped before he could control his temper. “There’s quite a few around. We’re stationed in the Circle of Magi if you hadn’t noticed. Full of mages. You’ll have to be a bit more specific.” _Stupid stupid stupid,_ his mind hissed as the stern look on the Knight-Lieutenant’s face darkened to flat out anger. Everyone knew Rutherford was the Knight-Commander’s little pet; the last thing he or Maddox needed was more attention drawn to them yet there he was, spitting at Rutherford like a raging bull with a red flag. 

 

Rutherford moved into his space, into his face with a hand on the collar of his armor to tug him down. The Knight-Lieutenant was thick with muscle but Raleigh had the lanky height that forced the Knight-Lieutenant to drag him several inches lower if he wanted to snarl in his face. 

 

“The little smith, Samson,” the Ferelden snapped. “That boy, Maddox.” Hearing his name on Rutherford’s lips made Raleigh’s blood boil beneath his skin. “You need to watch yourself. Your favor of him has been noticed and noted. The Knight-Commander isn’t pleased and you’re on your way out as it is.” 

 

Raleigh pushed back into Rutherford’s face until they were nearly touching noses. He was damned near ready to draw back his fist and deck the Knight-Lieutenant across his smug pretty Ferelden face if he didn’t know it would get him thrown in a cell for up to three days to calm down before he was dragged before the Knight-Commander to explain himself. “Are you threatening me, Rutherford?” He growled, voice low and dangerous as he could make it. 

 

The Knight-Lieutenant didn’t flinch. “I am educating you.” 

 

Shoving with his shoulder as hard as he dared, just enough to knock the Knight-Lieutenant back a few steps and the fuck out of his way, Raleigh snarled wordlessly and whipped around, needing to leave the area before he did something he would quickly grow to regret. Something uncontrolled and irreversible. 

 

“Didn’t know talking to the mages was a bloody crime now,” Raleigh said loudly as he kept walking, ignoring the still-spluttering Ferelden behind him. He spread his arms, motioning to his Templar brothers on each side who had stopped, in awe, to watch their uncharacteristic display. “Guess they’ll have to lock us all up then won’t they boys? A whole new prison just for Templars who bloody _talk_ to mages.” 

 

Maddox didn’t receive any visits or letters for two weeks after that, Raleigh seething with fear and rage and not wanting to accidentally lash out at the kind smith or his sweetheart. He drank his Lyrium, performed his duties adequately, played cards with Thrask while ignoring his questioning looks and aborted attempts at conversation, avoiding the desperate and disappointed face that peered out from the flower shop when he passed it, swiftly without pause on his way to and from the Gallows. 

 

But Raleigh couldn’t avoid Maddox and Mea forever even if he had wanted to. He was drawn to the boy like a moth to flame and a traitorous voice hissed that Rutherford had been so very right to suspect him as his eyes traced the gentle bow of Maddox’s mouth and he let another stack of letters, another paper bird in flight, be pushed into his waiting hands. It was those damned paper birds that always got him, and Maddox’s eyes and he could never say no despite the warning alarms blaring in his head that they _knew_ they were watching and he was going to get them both into a great deal of trouble.

 

Once he had he letters, Raleigh usually tried to leave the Gallows as quickly as he could, not wanting to be found with them on his person -something he would not easily explain away. But this time he stopped at the Templar barracks before heading out and withdrew the paper bird from where it rested against his racing heartbeat. These were the birds that carried Maddox’s love on their wings. Keeping just one wouldn’t hurt anything, could it? Mea had dozens of little birds now from the letter stacks; she wouldn’t miss just one. He damned near kissed the little paper thing before realizing how foolish it was, tucking the carefully folded bird into his copy of _The Chant of Light_ between _The Canticle of Benedictions_ and _The Canticle of Erudition_ for safekeeping. 

 

If Mea wondered at the lack of her little bird when he brought her the letters, she didn’t say anything, though she looked curiously from the bundle to Samson and back. Before he could turn away, she caught his arm and said his name, “Raleigh,” though he knew he had never introduced himself to her. It gave him a little thrill to know Maddox must be speaking of him in their letters. 

 

“Would you give Maddox something for me?” She asked softly and he snorted, raising an eyebrow, because wasn’t that what he was risking life and limb to do as it was? She gave him a look and a soft sigh, fidgeting uncharacteristically. Nervous. “Something a little different.” 

 

Raleigh couldn’t imagine the little flower girl would ask him to smuggle in something more incriminating than the letters he already carried and so he gave a one-shouldered easy shrug. Until her hand was moving up his arm and she was stepping around her stand and into his space and his mind stalled entirely. 

 

Mea had one hand on his upper arm and the other she shifted to cup the back of his neck, fingers carefully tangled into his short dark hair, as she leaned up to bring her face to his. Raleigh was frozen in shock and a little fear as the girl pressed a kiss to his cheek, lingering just a moment longer before stepping back from her tip toes and releasing him altogether. 

 

“Will you give him that, please? From me?” 

 

No answer would come, Raleigh rooted to the spot by the imprint of her lips on his face, the ghost of her fingers on his arm. He gaped at the girl for a full minute or two before spinning on hell and rushing away from her ignoring her soft swear and desperate call of his name at his back, clearly cursing herself for overstepping, for possibly ruining the tentative bond that held the three of them together. 

 

**__________**

  
****

Samson moved like a man in shock as he made his way back to the Gallows. Maddox wouldn’t be expecting him, not when he has just delivered the letters and wouldn’t -shouldn’t- have any messages for him until Mea had been given time to read his words and respond. But he _did_ have a message and his legs took him the smithing tent quite without his permission where Maddox greeted him with a soft smile that warmed the cold edges of fear building inside of him. Maddox looked concerned, pulling Raleigh by the hand closer to fire and asking if he was all right, if Mea was all right and why he looked like he’d seen a ghost. 

 

“She has a message for you,” Raleigh found himself murmuring. “Your girl.” And Maddox only managed to look more concerned. “She wanted me to give you something.” He stepped close, caging Maddox against the workbench in a way that felt wrong after years of promising the mages they didn’t owe him shit for his favors. But this wasn’t like that. This was for Mea and for Maddox and he was just… He was just the page on which the letter was written. He was the paper bird carrying their love. 

 

Glancing around the smithing tent to be sure it was empty of everyone but the two of them, with no Templars or mages milling around outside, Samson leaned down as close to Maddox as he could get. The mage was still in his grasp, but not stiff, holding his breath and looking at Samson with those kind, expressive eyes. They were close enough that they were sharing breath, foreheads touching before Samson ducked his head a little further and touched his lips, light as a feather, to the soft skin of Maddox’s cheek. He lingered there as Maddox’s breath left him in a soft whoosh, hands coming up to hold the Templar in place and where the mage’s hands touched Raleigh, his skin burned. 

 

Maddox made to turn his head like he was meaning to draw Samson’s kiss -Mea’s kiss from Samson’s lips- to his mouth when Samson finally found himself and carefully drew away, extracting himself from the heat of Maddox’s grip and stepping back from the workbench. He felt Maddox’s eyes follow him, curious and warm as he cleared his throat and straightened his armor. 

 

“Anyway,” he startled himself with his hoarse voice. “She wanted me to give you that.” 

 

The mage was smiling at him, a sudden coyness to the turn of lips that Raleigh had never seen wasn’t sure he wanted. “I can give her a response now, if you like?” He offered, leaning back against the work table and it was Raleigh this time who flushed to the ears and coughed uncomfortably, shaking his head in a wordless declination. Maddox looked concerned for a moment, that they had ruined what they had between them with a single kiss, but Raleigh waved it off with a half-forced laugh and told him he’d bring him more of Mea’s letters in a few days time when she had written out her replies to him. Hesitating in the entryway to the tent, he turned back and added that maybe - _maybe-_ he’d have another gift. 

 

Leaving Maddox grinning in the smithy Raleigh left at a brisk walk though he wanted to bolt as fast as his legs would take him. He didn’t bother knocking when he reached Thrask’s door, knowing it was his day off of duties and that he would already have returned from visiting Ambra at the Blooming Rose. Though the older Templar started in surprise at the abrupt entry and lack of greeting, he stood by in bemusement as Samson stalked wordlessly into the room, took a seat on Thrask’s bed, and face-planted into his pillow. He spoke the words ringing in his ears and in his chest muffled into the rough fabric and heard Thrask sigh behind him. 

 

Heaving a sigh, Thrask took a seat on the edge of his bed, feeling very much like was trying to tempt his young daughter into eating her vegetables for all the way Raleigh was acting. “You’re being melodramatic, Raleigh,” he scolded gently, resting a hand on the younger Templar’s shoulder. “Now what could possibly be the matter that you feel the need to act like such a child?” 

 

“I’m in love with him.” Samson repeated, lifting his head from Thrask’s pillow. “Maddox. I… I’m in love with Maddox.” 

 

The words hung in the air, heavy with the poison of their implication, and Thrask was struck silent. He knew, of course he knew, but hearing Samson realize it and admit it aloud was entirely different. He stroked a hand down his friend’s trembling back in what he hoped was a comfort. 

 

“Fuck.” 

 

**__________**

 

They came for him in the middle of the night. A heavy pounding at the door that roused him from a half-drunk sleep, the hard whiskey Thrask had plied him with until his hands stopped shaking still sluggish in his veins. Two of his brothers in arms standing at his door, no word no explanation as they grabbed him by the arms and dragged him, still in his sleep clothes, through the barracks to the Knight-Commander’s office.

 

She was waiting in full regalia despite the hour and her blue eyes were blazing triumphant when he was thrown at her feet. A stack of familiar letters lay neatly on her desk and Raleigh could have groaned if he had less sense or more alcohol. Maddox hadn’t burned all of Mea’s letters. 

 

“Knight-Templar Raleigh Samson,” she began in her domineering voice that made him flinch. “You have been a disgrace to the Templar Order for far too long and finally we have the evidence to do something about it.” She pushed the letters forward on her desk, smirking. 

 

Raleigh, too drunk and angry to be smart, snarled at her, shouting that they were just _letters_ just stupid little love letters from a stupid boy to his even stupider girl outside. A slap on the wrist maybe,some double duties and graveyard shifts, but she couldn’t _throw him out_ over it. 

 

And then Rutherford stepped out of the shadows and placed a paper bird, _his_ paper bird the one he’d hidden in his room, on the table and unfolded it to show the words to the room. _“I love you, always. Your Maddox.”_ And nothing he screamed at them made any difference. Maddox didn’t love _him_ he loved his girl. Raleigh was just a bloody messenger pigeon. But his cries fell on deaf ears as Meredith drew up a paper of dismissal. 

 

“You have become erratic and dangerous to the Order. Your Lyrium addiction is severe and has been noted many times. You, Raleigh Samson, are a disgrace to the Sunburst shield and to the Sword of Mercy, and I release you from your duties.” 

 

She handed him the paper and he clutched it in his fist mindlessly, staring around the room and ready to burst. He thrashed in the Templars’ hold when they reached for, screaming and unbelieving, and the paper bird fell from the desk to be trampled underfoot. He lost himself staring at it, crumpled and broken, and the fight bled out of him as quickly as it had begun. Two Templars, _Mettin and Varnell_ , his mind supplied blankly, steered him firmly out of Meredith’s office and toward the looming gates.

 

“Raleigh?” He heard Thrask’s voice call from down the hall to the barracks and turned numbly to see one of their sisters in arms holding him back, open horror on his honest face. They turned the corner then and Thrask was gone. 

 

And then they were tossing him out and he was left staring helplessly at the closed gates of the Gallows, the open world at his back. 


	2. Kiss on the Palm

He wasn’t Raleigh anymore. Everything that had made him Raleigh was gone. Raleigh was a stupid Templar-Knight who thought he could make the lives of the mages better by bringing them sweets and kind smiles. Raleigh was a man who thought he could keep a mage and his girl together by passing letters and never get caught. Raleigh was the pathetic fool and a sap who fell in love with a mage watching him be in love with his girl and got them both fucked for it. Everything that was _Raleigh_ had burned away beneath the Lyrium’s screaming song in his bones and in his blood and what was left in the charred remains was barely enough to be _Samson_. 

 

Samson woke up to the rough rumbling of sailors and tradesmen, stretching from his curled and cramped position beneath the stairs of the docks. The pain in his bones -burned there from the Lyrium and not helped by being stuck sleeping in dank alleyways and underneath stairwells- nearly grounded him when he tried to sit up. The pain was familiar though increasing with every day. But this was Kirkwall and it wasn’t safe to sleep for more than a few hours at a time -when he could get to sleep without the ache or the nightmares keeping him up and screaming- or to remain in one place for too long. He usually stayed up most of the night, half to keep himself safe from the gangs and slavers that overran Kirkwall’s streets when the lights went out, and half to catch any snippets of odd jobs or scams he might get in on. 

 

**__________**

 

It had only been a few months since his abrupt ejection from the Templar Order, maybe half a year. Once the shock and terror had worn off, he had set to work, knowing that as early as the next morning the Lyrium shakes would start in his fingers. He had coin enough on him to get a night at the Hanged Man but he opted for a cheaper and filthier hole in the wall near the borders of Darktown to save as much as could. The Order had allowed him to collect his paltry belongings, his copy of The Chant of Light and some clothes, the next morning at the gates. His shield and sword stayed behind, unfit as he was to wield them in the Chantry’s name. It burned more than he wanted to admit to lose them. 

 

Tucked in with the stack of clothing he found three vials of Lyrium. Three days to get him through, more if he could manage to ration it. He wondered who slipped them in, not the two who met him at the gates, new recruits he couldn’t assign a name to the face, and he wanted to ask about Maddox but kept his mouth shut, too cowardly to hear the response if he was even afforded one. He had thanked them gruffly and turned heel. Samson didn’t know how many eyes were trained on his back, how fast word had spread through the night and early morning of his departure, his betrayal of the Order, but he felt the heat of the stares as he went and held his head as high as his trembling shoulders would allow. 

 

There was no stipend of Lyrium or coin for Templars disgraced and dishonored. He could get a job even with the reputation of his discharge but the Lyrium would be another matter altogether. People didn’t just quit Lyrium. It wrapped its poison roots around Templar’s throats and their insides, burrowing into the marrow of their bones until they couldn’t breathe without it. It was why the rarely retired Templars had to be plied carefully with Lyrium until they breathed their last, mad with the taint of it in their hearts but soothed and shielded from the pain of withdrawal. Templars couldn’t just quit and most of those who made the attempt died contorted and screaming. And Samson’s fast-built resistance and addiction was well noted.

 

There were ways to get ahold of Lyrium -the Dust, he had quickly learned it was referred to on the streets- without being a Templar. The Chantry largely controlled the trade but they had to get it from somewhere, from Orzammar or the Dwarven gangs that he had ruled both there and on the surface. Where anything was traded legally there were ten ways to get it illegally if only he could find the right people, the right ears to bend and pockets to fill. It would be an option if he needed it. If he couldn’t manage to fight off the poison on his own, and rolling the stolen vials in his still-trembling hands, Samson had wondered if he _could_.

 

Lyrium was a short leash on which the Chantry held its Templars and even as he’d have begged on his knees, groveled before the wretched Knight-Commander Meredith and her sick traitorous Ferelden puppy of a Knight-Lieutenant if it had let him back into their good graces, he wanted to be free of the chain. There was nothing he could do to return to the Order and they wanted, he knew, to know he would be starving and freezing on the streets, strung out and delirious with it; he wanted to prove the bastards wrong. He clenched his fists, resolute. Never let the bastards grind you down. 

 

The City Guard was forever in need of more members. Kirkwall’s streets at all levels, from the prissy Hightown to the shadowed and chokedamp Darktown were overrun with gangs in the night and pickpockets by day. The steady trickle of Ferelden refugees looking to escape the supposed Blight was slowly turning into a flood as rumors of destruction spread. The City Guard barracks within the Viscount’s Keep would also solve the issue of housing at least for awhile. Samson started there as soon as the sun was high enough and he had dressed properly. The Captain of the Guard, Ewald, seemed bored of his duties and unimpressed by Samson’s training record, especially when he revealed that he could not provide his own shield and sword. He looked like he wanted to dismiss Samson immediately had they not recently lost several members to slavers on the Wounded Coast and grudgingly slid a contract over his desk. 

 

The trembling in his hands became twitches in his arms, uncoordinated and involuntary spasms that made him drop his borrowed sword during sparring. The Lyrium vials he kept hidden at his breast burned against his skin, singing to him a song the others couldn’t hear, a temptation that made him bite down on the meat of his palm to keep from ripping the vial out and downing it, glass and all, just to make the singing and the shakes stop. It was only the beginning, he knew, and so he would only take the smallest of sips when he couldn’t stand the migraines and the voices a moment longer, when he couldn’t drag himself from his bunk to do rounds. Three vials weren’t going to last him long; he needed to do better if he wanted to clean himself of the poison forever.

 

The work itself was too dull to be a sufficient distraction. Run rounds, deliver goods, fight off members of the Coterie, Raiders and the like which were old hat following the mages he’d had to bring down under the Order. Every once in awhile they’d come across a blood mage or foreign enchanter and Samson’s Templar training would come back in full, leaving his fellow guardsmen standing in awe. It was nice for awhile to be looked at like something important again, like something _worthy_. But he needed a stronger distraction from the shakes and the bone-deep pain that made it difficult to leave his bunk. Days he would have spent collapsed in his bed in the Gallows he now had to drag himself up for fear of losing his job and the pain was crippling now, finding him stumbling in the halls and the alleyways. 

 

When the last vial went dry a month after his explosion from the Order a cold terror dropped in the pit of Samson’s stomach. That was it: quit and possibly die trying or find another path and keep his leash on tight. 

 

Every day that week Samson awoke in more pain than the morning before. He could barely throw himself from the bed let alone perform his duties. Desperation could only get a man so far and his desperation to stay strong was waning. Nearly collapsing on an evening route through Hightown when a wave of nausea and agony hit him, to the irritation but not surprise of his fellow guardsman, Wright, who then had to haul his ass back to the barracks and dump in his bunk with a sneer, was the last straw for the Guard-Captain.

 

“Get yourself together, boy,” Guard-Captain Ewald growled from the door too early the next morning, while Samson was trapped in a fever nightmare, blankets stuck to his sweat-slicked and chilled skin. “You hear me?” He leaned closer when he received no response. “Get yourself sorted or you’re out on the street. I don’t care what kind of training you’ve had, if you can’t do your work, you don’t have a place here.” And he left Samson to wallow in his misery and pain. 

 

A few hours later Samson received another unwelcome visitor. Jeven was on the rise within the City Guard, mostly through unsavory means -not that Samson had much room to judge anyone at the moment, lying sick in soiled sheets. Jeven was noisily eating an apple as he perched himself on the edge of Samson’s bunk, smirking down at him. He dropped a second apple on Samson’s chest, the sudden pressure of even the simple apple on his oversensitive skin making him gasp and flinch away, lacking the energy to do anything to defend himself but hiss. 

 

“I know what you need.” Jeven leered, leaning too close into Samson’s face. “You need a little bit of Blue Dust, ex-Templar, or you’re going to rot away. I’ve seen it happen.” The guard looked entirely too gleeful at the prospect of having seen the mighty Templars crumble and break away, at having the chance to see Samson fall to the same fate. He was a petty fuck, Samson knew, but it didn’t stop his breath from hitching when Jeven leaned ever closer, stale breath steaming against his face, “ I know where you can get some - for a price.” 

 

If Andraste herself had come into the room and begged him to be a stronger man, a better man, and to hold fast, he would have told her, weeping, to fuck off. It _hurt_ like nothing ever had before, not leaving his siblings, cutting down his first mage to fail their Harrowing and shake the demon’s hand. Not his first morning the Lyrium had faded too fast, not Guylian’s death and Meredith’s rise to power. Not falling in love with Maddox, watching him smile, glowing with his love for another. Not seeing his beautiful paper birds falling from the skies, dying, to be trampled beneath the might of the Knight Commander. Nothing hurt like this, veins on fire, bones crumbling to dust and lungs squeezed of air from the terrible agony of it all. 

 

He reached up, feeble, and took Jeven’s hand. The man smirked, dark and dangerous, and told him he’d have a little taste and a contact within a few hours. A finders’ fee, a percentage of the cost he paid for each cut, and a few favors now and then would be his price and he could have asked for Samson’s right arm and Samson would have reached for a knife to obey. 

 

The Dust, clumping as it mixed with water, was not as pure as what the Chantry gave him, smooth and silky and slipping down his throat like an elixir for all of his problems. The dust from Darktown burned as it went down like cheap liquor but it sang so sweet in his veins after so long of silence, of screaming, that Samson moaned aloud when the pain faded to something throbbing and thrumming and _tolerable_ toward the back of his mind. He was a traitor, not only to the order but to the mages and to himself, his promise not to let the Chantry grab him by the throat and march him out. But he wasn’t in pain anymore and the sweet song lulled the gnawing grief and guilt in his stomach until its cries were whispers and then nothing at all and he slipped into a more blissful sleep, unable to even thank Jeven properly.

 

If anyone in the City Guard wondered how or why Samson had gone from screaming on his deathbed to jauntily running about his duties, they didn’t ask and he refused to dwell upon it. A vial would last him another week if he was careful and he knew that of course the only reason he had struggled was his attempt to quit cold turkey. He wasn’t weak and Lyrium-addled he was just going about ripping the poison from his veins the wrong way. He _wasn’t_ pathetic; he could do this, just a bit at a time.

 

Resistance build fast even after over a week with not a drop of poisonous blue in his heart, it was only hours after downing a gulp from the vial that Samson’s hands began to twitch for more. He clenched his shaking fists and swore to himself he would make it last. He could do it. Just another week and he’d send Jeven out to his dwarven masters for more. 

 

But it was only three days before Samson was leaning against Jeven’s bunk, cold sweat soaking his night shirt through and eyes hazy and blazing, fists bunching in the rough fabric of Jeven’s undershirt and hissing that he _needed_ more. He could pay, he’d give the man his entire months stipend from the guard if he’d just _give him the name_. 

 

Though Jeven liked money he hated Templars and hated being told what to do even more. Shoving Samson away, knocking the frailer man to the floor, he stormed from the room and returned with Guard Captain Ewald and pointing fat fingers in his face, calling him a dangerous addict, a liability. And Ewald gave Samson a look of disgust where he was curled on the floor, grabbed him bodily by the scruff of his neck like no one had done since he was twelve, a scrawny kitten needing to be tamed, and hurled him down the steps of the Viscount’s Keep, along with his paltry belongings.

 

Samson looked up at the stairs and wondered how this had become his life.

 

**__________**

  

He only ran into Mea once. Samson had done his very best to avoid her, terrified of having to be the one to tell what had become of Maddox and that it was his own fault. He was afraid because she would hate him but more afraid that he would have to speak the words - that he had no way of contacting the boy, that the both of them were likely to never see him again if he was even alive, that more than Maddox’s fool decision not to burn Mea’s letters, it had been his own choices that got them caught. That he had been stupid enough to keep one of the his birds and it had branded him a traitor and Maddox guilty of corruption.

 

It was Mea who came across him on a day he was slumped and shaking in a dark corner of Lowtown. He didn't even notice her until she was kneeling before him, hands on his shoulders and shaking him. Samson watched her mouth move, uncomprehendingly, the scream of the Lyrium Thirst too loud in his bones to focus on her words. But he knew shape of Maddox's name on her lips if nothing else and he tried to shy away from it, shaking his head desperately no matter how she cried and smacked at him for answers.

 

Ever the coward, Samson closed his eyes and hunkered down as low as he could get against the floor, as low as his heart felt rattling in his hollow ribs, until Mea gave up, weeping, and turned away. She knew what he wouldn't say - couldn't say and she hated him for it. Samson found himself jealous of her; she could flee, crying, to her home and find comfort there, knowing it was not through fault of her own that had put Maddox in his grave. Samson would be forever stung with his decisions, a lead weight in his bones the replace the Lyrium of guilt and shame.

 

For months after, Samson would continue to avoid the corner of the Lowtown Marketplace where Mea's little flower shop stood. On his most lucid days, Samson would hope she could move on and leave him to his guilt alone. On his worst, he hoped he felt as guilty as he did for ever sending those damned letters in the first place. When they passed in the street, they both would look away and eventually he stopped being plagued by the shadow of her flower shop in the corner of his eye. 

 

**__________**

 

Vagrants were so common in Kirkwall that the more fortunate citizens of the city who had homes and food and jobs often forgot they existed. It was frustrating from a financial standpoint: if people didn’t see you, they certainly weren’t going to be tossing coin in your cup or shoving a hard roll of day-old bread into your hands, and from the point of view of having your existence denied and ignored by the people around you. But it did have one edge: when people didn’t see you, they said things they would have otherwise kept behind closed doors. For Samson, that blissful ignorance of his existence gave him a way to survive the wretched city. 

 

With fewer Templars willing to oppose her following Samson’s expulsion from the Order, Knight-Commander Meredith’s iron fist clenched tighter and the crushed mages clutched in her grip fought harder. Most parents weren’t ever excited to lose their little magelings to the Circle as it was, but as word began to spread of the unchecked Templar cruelty both within the city walls and all across the country, Kirkwall becoming a beacon of Templar power and mage fear and oppression, more and more parents sought to hide their baby apostates. They were willing to put up with the dangers of having magic untrained in their homes rather than chance seeing their sons and daughters ripped from their homes, raped and starved, put to the sword or worse. 

 

Samson couldn’t blame them. Maddox was likely dead, body burned or thrown out like the garbage the Chantry thought he was and there was nothing Samson could do about it. He sometimes thought, in the blessed moments of clarity between Lyrium-sweet high when he could get it and crippling withdrawal when he wouldn’t, about all those little magelings stuck under the thumbscrews of the power-mad and prejudiced Templars with so few willing to step up and help protect them. 

 

One evening on the rare occasion that Kirkwall had a sprinkling of storms found Samson huddled beneath the lip of a line of shoddily-built housing to shield himself from the damp, crouched beneath an open window and inside two people were talking loudly -too loudly for a city such as this- about their mage daughter, whose magic was getting out of control for their little house to contain.

 

“You’re afraid of her,” the woman was accusing her husband, and Samson could picture her shaking her first in his face as she spoke. “You’re afraid of your own daughter just because she can make a little fire when she’s upset or give you a little shock when she’s angry.”

 

Her husband was replying quietly enough that Samson couldn’t easily hear, not with the Lyrium scream rising above it in his ears, but he caught the tone and knew the man was trying to placate his enraged wife. Samson could imagine what the man was saying. He wasn’t scared _of_ her, he was terrified _for_ her. It was a dangerous world for little magelings and Kirkwall most dangerous of all. 

 

Forcing himself to his feet, Samson leaned in the open window to the startled yelps of the couple just inside.

 

“Shut your damned window if you want to keep your mageling daughter safe, for Andraste’s sake,” he snapped at the shocked pair, gaping at the filthy man who had appeared their window and was dripping grimy rain water onto their breakfast table. “You can’t just talk loudly about apostates in the middle of bloody Kirkwall with your window wide open. I can’t believe you’ve managed to keep the poor girl a secret this long.” 

 

The couple were still gawping, tongues tied, and Samson continued, each word more stupid than the last. “I can get her out of Kirkwall. I can get your girl to safety.”

 

The woman snarled with a ferocity he hadn’t expected from the way she had stood stock-still and petrified at his appearance and then there was a flash of silver and pressure at his neck. It was a tiny thing, a kitten’s claw made of pyrophite and not even sharp enough to draw blood but Samson held up his hands in defeat all the same, moving to back out of the window and give the couple back their space. A proud mother lion with the claw of a kitten protecting her young. 

 

“I was a Templar. I know the paths they take on rounds. I know what they can do and how to get around it. I can get your girl out of the city.”

 

The woman backed away, still brandishing her knife and looking rightfully wary. Her husband came up to put his hands on her shoulders, looking for more resigned than his better half, more willing to be rid of his magic-afflicted child than she was and willing to trust a homeless stranger to do it. The man asked his price and Samson responded with the first number that came to mind.

 

“Thirty pieces of silver.” 

 

Immediately the woman lashed out again, moving forward as if to rip his throat out, dull knife or no, screeching that he meant to rob them, but he cut her off.

 

“Thirty pieces of silver and your little girl is safe. What’s some coin for your child’s safety and happiness? Knowing she’s not in Templar hands?”

 

It wasn’t a guarantee exactly. The kid could get out of Kirkwall only to be picked up by Templars in any other city and hauled off in chains to another Circle Tower. But it was better than staying here were she would be certainly found out and, if the Knight-Commander could make the accusation that she had influenced her parents, tricked them into hiding her, she would be put to the sword or the Lyrium brand faster than her little mother lion could reach for the kitten’s claw. 

 

Samson knew ship captains and smugglers from hanging around the docks and running errands for petty coin. Thirty silver would be more than enough to grease a few palms and still have enough to get himself a few vials of the Dust from the Darktown dealers and Carta thugs. Maybe even some food if he had better self control. 

 

The couple looked at one another for a long moment, longer than Samson cared to stand in the drizzling and chill of the rain. When they turned back to him resolute, a grin spread across his thin face in triumph.

 

**__________**

 

Samson hadn’t seen many Templars out and about since he had taken up the post in the City Guard. he worked mainly nights, being the newest member and shoved quickly onto the worst routes and shifts, and there had been a strange lull in blood mages requiring the Templars’ interference for the time being. But on that morning a familiar face passed by, and Samson nearly stumbled over himself rushing after the ginger-haired knight, crying his name in unabashed need. 

 

It was Thrask and the man stopped, turning grudgingly, as Samson reached him, nearly collapsing against his armor in relief. All niceties left Samson’s mind and he clutched at his old friend, feeling the Lyrium on him, the scent of it, the song of it in his blood crying out for him and all thought of asking after his friend and what had happened since his dismissal fled. His mouth opened without his permission and he found himself hissing, leaning far too close into Thrask’s space, into his face, for a little Lyrium to spare, just a vial just a _taste_ he was hurting so much. 

 

The man who had been his closest friend nearly dumped him on the ground, head shaking and disgust twisting his face and Samson knew he had fucked up, cursing himself and his need as he flinched on the ground, rasping apologies.

 

“Thrask?” Samson whispered, terrified of the answer but desperate to know. “What of Maddox? What did they do to him?” He hadn’t asked the Knight-Commander when she had him dragged into her office, Maddox’s paper bird crumpled under her feet. He hadn’t asked the knights who hauled him out or the two who shoved his belongings into his hands at the gates the next morning. He hadn’t wanted to know or hadn’t wanted to hear it from them. But Thrask had been his friend and he was here now he couldn’t… He couldn’t _not_ ask, couldn’t not know. 

 

Thrask’s face shuttered closed and he shook his head, pity in every motion, every line of his body. “I told you to be careful, Raleigh. I told you you were getting too close. Too attached.”

 

He didn’t have the heart or piece of mind to tell Thrask that he wasn’t sure he was Raleigh anymore, that Raleigh had died in the Knight-Commander’s office with Maddox’s paper birds. It wasn’t an answer and that filled Samson with more dread than any actual response he could have received. If Thrask didn’t want to tell him, couldn’t bear to say it even as angry and frustrated with Samson as he was…

 

The world very suddenly went dark and Samson heard the distant sound of Thrask swearing and lunging for him as he crashed to to the ground, legs having given out and crumpled beneath the weight of the news. He had known, of course, that Maddox would receive a harsher punishment than his own dishonorable dismissal, but what the charges were that he would face and the verdict behind them, Samson hadn’t known. To think the boy was dead or worse and that he had helped to fit the noose around his thin neck was too much for Samson to bear. 

 

Awareness came back to Samson in gentle waves. Thrask had dragged his near-prone form all the way to the Hanged Man and shoved him into a seat at a table near the fire. The air was warm but he shuddered all the same as his friend -former friend, he supposed- tutted over him, ever the father, and called for the barmaid to bring over some stew and water and possibly a blanket. Slowly Samson became aware of the heat of the fire against his chilled skin, the rough fabric of the blanket wrapped over his shoulders and the gentle chatter of Thrask worrying in his ear. 

 

“When is the last time you had some food in you?” Thrask murmured, more to himself than to Samson, “Maker, you’re just bone and filth.” And Samson tried not to snort. 

 

“S’not food I’m hungry for.” 

 

Thrask didn’t answer, not that Samson had really expected him to, beyond a soft sigh and to push the glass of water into his hand and order him to drink. He obeyed, grudgingly, if only to keep himself from being parented. He wouldn’t put it past Thrask to actually hold the glass of water to his lips and coax him to open his mouth. The Lyrium could keep a man going without food or water for much longer than was natural, it’s sick sweet poison coating the stomach and tricking it into believing it was full and happy. It seemed a waste to spend what little coin he had on mutton or bear when the Dust was waiting for him an elevator ride away in Darktown. 

 

But Thrask wouldn’t understand that. Thrask didn’t understand _anything_ if the way he’d been ignoring Samson’s letters told him anything. It was incredibly stupid and dangerous, for the both of them and considering the way he’d been thrown out, with little letters for sweethearts. It was insane that he would endanger a fellow Templar, a former friend at that, by scribbling his own letters to the man begging for Lyrium to spare to keep himself afloat. But if Thrask had thought to answer any of them he hadn’t sent any Samson’s way and a bitterness crept into his heart as he gazed into the warm and concerned brown eyes that Thrask had turned his way.

 

“I heard you’ve been helping some apostates.” 

 

It wasn’t the comment Samson had expected to hear and he responded with a shrug. “Someone should.”

 

Thrask was eyeing him with the same pitying look he had given Samson for weeks on end in the Gallows. Yes, poor stupid Samson, poor addicted pathetic soft hearted little Raleigh Samson. Too soft for this work too _concerned_ for his dangerous charges. _Susceptible to mage corruption_ , they had listed in his release documents. Feeble-minded. It wasn’t exactly the look Thrask was giving him now, more concern and less disgust, but it brought about in Samson an irrational wave of anger. Thrask hadn’t stood up for him when they hauled him out. Thrask hadn’t protected Maddox for him. He had just stood by and watched Samson drown himself in the young mage’s love for another. 

 

Samson wasn’t given the chance to voice his anger, however, as the barmaid arrived with his stew, settling the mouth-watering bowl of warm luscious meats and vegetables, in front of him and the anger twisted in his stomach to hunger. He fell upon the bowl like the wolf he was, stray and starving, and if the other patrons noticed his lack of manners in throwing himself at the stew they were gracefully silent. 

 

The pitying look was still present in Thrask’s face when Samson drained the bowl entirely, grimy hands reaching for the pieces that had escaped his bowl and eager mouth in his efforts to shovel it all in as fast as he possibly could, but less clear and less grating now that his stomach was full of more than Darktown chokedamp and the last dregs of Lyrium. He ordered a room for the night, for his old friend, he told the barmaid who eyed Samson like the last thing she wanted was to clean out a room after he’d been lying in it. He’d have protested the suddenly flush of kindness from the man who had wanted to dump him the streets only an hour before, but the prospect of a real bed with pillows and blankets and a fireplace. A bath with clean hot water to scrub away several months of grime and filth and muck from his aching skin was almost as tempting as a vial. 

 

Thrask left him with a solemn pat on the shoulder and a handful of coin that he advised, pleaded, Samson use to get the hell out of Kirkwall, citing it as no place for a Templar without a Chantry. He knew what Samson would use it for. He knew Samson would wake the next morning refreshed and relaxed and blessedly clean and march straight to the Darktown dealers for a new fix. But he hoped and that hope cut at Samson like a newly-sharped blade sliding through thin flesh and hot blood. He wasn’t worthy of that kind of trust and hope and everyone else but Thrask seemed to know it. 

 

Samson didn’t go to Darktown the next day. Thrask believed in him in a way he didn’t deserve. He wanted to be worthy of that kind of trust. If he died from the effects of the withdrawal then at least… at least he would die with some measure of honor even if it was only a teaspoon. 

 

**__________**

 

More apostates started to find him, encouraged by the successful escape of his first rescued little mageling. The girl’s parents had gotten word from her in a quiet little village several weeks’ ride from Kirkwall’s city gates that she was safe and free with no Templars around to frighten her and the mother had come to find him at night on the docks, thrown her arms around him and nearly knocking him to down the stairs in thanks. She had of course spread the word as quietly as she could about the retired  Templar -he didn’t have the heart or desire to correct her- helping little magelings out of the dangerous city. 

It brought to Samson what he had missed most about being a Templar - the satisfaction of being needed that the Lyrium couldn’t provide. He could no longer offer his little favors -not little favors but traitorous actions that could get him thrown in prison and the magelings pretty little Lyrium brands on their faces- for nothing in return. It broke his heart to turn away terrified children and their parents away who had no coin to give. But this wasn’t the Gallows, it was the street. He needed coin to help them get out and he needed coin to eat or buy shelter or, on a day when he couldn’t move and the pain rocked him to his core and he thought -didn’t  _think_  he  _was-_ dying,he needed the coin to take to the dust dealers of Darktown to barter away what was left of his soul.

But the magelings and their parents found their way to the docks at night and though there were lulls in the business, he found himself with more coin than he’d had since leaving the city guard months before. Not enough to live but enough to fill his stomach with food most nights, even a flagon of ale or two if a particularly wealthy family had come needing his services. The steady flow of food and the satisfaction of saving the little magelings of his city made the Lyrium-pangs easier to push off, though he still had days he couldn’t drag himself from beneath the dockside staircases, they easier to handle and Samson was able to avoid Darktown and his cold-eyed dealer for a few good months before everything went to shit.

 

**__________**

 

On a particularly bad day, Samson was slumped, half-conscious and shuddering, against a wall near the Gallows entrance. He sometimes hung around, out of sight, to try and get an ear for how things were going inside. It was foolish to still worry for the mages and his Templar brothers but it didn’t stop the twist in his stomach that came whenever a minor uprising was announced as having been culled quickly and efficiently. He had heard that a group of Starkhaven mages had made it as far as the Wounded Coast before Karras, much more a disgrace to the Templar Order than Samson had ever been, had tracked them down and dragged them back to the Circle.

He’d heard his old friend Thrask had been involved and wasn’t sure if was irritated or proud of the hypocrisy. Though they hadn’t interacted since Thrask had bought him a meal and a room for the night, Samson had seen Thrask around, talking to the mages in the Gallows Courtyard in hushed tones, looking as jumpy as Samson had felt while carrying Maddox’s letters. They crossed paths every once in awhile but Thrask didn’t ask for or offer further assistance and Samson didn’t know how to talk to him anymore, not like they used to. They drifted apart. 

Samson didn't like to be caught so weak this close to the Templars’ swords. He wasn’t a friend to the Order anymore and if he was going to be in the Gallows, he preferred to do it at as close to his best as he could manage. But his bones ached and refused to hold his weight. He _needed_ the Dust, chest caving in at the thought. Each time he tried to quit he would make it a little longer, a week or two more before the pain would become unbearable and he would find himself stumbling, crawling if he had to, to his Dust dealer’s laughing sneering face. He had collapsed there in the shadows and couldn’t manage to drag himself anywhere, not even to Darktown for relief. 

When a presence appeared at his side, Samson could not bring himself to acknowledge it. A Templar he had known once looking to jeer at how far he had fallen, a kid wanting to pick his pockets for enough coin to buy bread, a city guard to haul him out of the way. He didn’t care. The figure knelt down carefully and he felt cool hands reaching for and cupping his face.

The scent hit him hard, the song soft, a barely there hum of melody and he nearly moaned. _Lyrium_. The hands cupping his face had traces of Lyrium all over, dusting the long, thing fingers and calloused palms. He pressed his mouth eagerly, obscenely, to the skin of the palms cradling his face and their owner allowed him to. He kissed and licked the flesh, mewling like a kitten for milk, until there was nothing left. It wasn’t enough Lyrium to sustain him but enough that he could lift his head to thank the stranger and his heart stopped in his chest when his eyes met that face.

“Hello again, Knight-Templar Samson.” 

The voice was low and soft, devoid of emotion. The face murmuring the words carefully blank. Those once bright and expressive brown eyes shielded and dull and when Samson looked higher, the Lyrium brand was seared perfectly into the boy’s forehead, made even more stark by his shaved head. _Maddox._

It was Maddox but it wasn’t. His Maddox had been bright and bubbling with an easy laugh and a big heart. And those _bastards_ had taken his sweet lively boy and pressed a burning brand into his skin, cut him off from the Fade and his magic. They had carved away the mage Samson had loved and left an obedient shell, they could still mine for his skills.

“No.” 

The word left him in a dry sob. He scrambled, the pain in his chest overriding the pain in his bones, forcing him to move up, grasping at the mage’s robes with shaking hands to haul him closer. “No. No no no, _Maddox_.” He touched the boy’s face, the cheek he had once kissed and the gentle eyes. The Tranquil didn’t make any motion to stop him, watching him passively with that awful blank expression. 

He hadn’t known. Thrask had only said he was sorry, that he had told Samson to be more careful and then tried to walk away. He had thought… He had thought that meant they had seen fit to execute Maddox or send him away. He was _harrowed_ damn them, he had proven himself worthy and they had…. They had killed everything in him that made life worth living. They had _killed_ Maddox and left him lifeless and walking around, performing in the smithy and making their wares but with no _life_. 

There was nothing Samson could do to apologize, nothing he could say to convey the swelling storm rising inside his chest and drowning out every other sense but the pain in his ribs and the screaming in his ears. His entire vocabulary reduced to Maddox’s name, whispered over and over in dry sobs as he touched the boy’s shoulders, his face, his hands. He kept pressing his mouth to Maddox’s palms, though the hints of Lyrium were long gone by then, shaking against his hands. 

Maddox accepted everything Samson was giving him in solemn silence, unable to react in any way even if he had wanted to. A Templar, not one who recognized, who had been escorting the Tranquil from his table selling wares for the Chantry back to his quarters in the Gallows, hesitated at their side, flitting and nervous enough that he must have heard of Samson and his involvement with Maddox. He cleared his throat loud enough that Maddox gave the softest sigh and drew back from Samson, though the former Templar sobbed again when they lost contact. 

“Goodbye Knight Templar Samson.”

Samson watched in horror as Maddox was led away from him by the nervous young Templar, frozen to his place on the ground until the pair turned the corner and out of his sight. He scrambled up, fighting the screaming in his bones at the movement and ran like a bat out of hell toward the stairs leading to Darktown. He couldn’t do this he couldn’t handle this knowledge sober.

Forty-five minutes and every scrap of coin he owned later, Samson was Lyrium-drunk and shaking with the power and strength of the blue in veins and the anger in his heart. He found Thrask in the Gallows Courtyard where the Templar was often stationed and before words could form, before thoughts of action and consequence could register in his addled brain, Samson found himself launching at Thrask, hands reaching for his throat with a wordless and inhuman howl.

He didn’t remember much of what happened next, as the other Templars and bystanders in the area rushed to Thrask’s defense. He fingers were wrenched from the older man’s throat and he was hauled away, still screaming at Thrask, _how dare he, how dare he hide what happened to Maddox,_ and was hurled down the stairs toward the docks. The last thing he remembered before his head struck the stone hard enough to knock him out despite the strength of the Lyrium in his blood, was the look of horror and pity on Thrask’s face, and the disgust on Knight-Lieutenant Rutherford’s, before the world went dark.

 

**__________**

 

A face too familiar for Samson’s chaffed heart appeared early one morning when he was just waking. Thrask’s eyes shining out of a young bright face. Olivia was lucky that her eyes, maybe her ears, were the only physical features she inherited from her father - she looked so much like Ambra that it was hard to argue who her father had been and it had kept her -and Thrask- safe from suspicion. 

Samson had avoided the Gallows, the Hanged Man tavern, anywhere he knew Thrask might turn up, too angry to see the man’s face without wanting to beat it into a bloody mess of flesh and bone. He did not want to see Thrask’s eyes, hopeful and sweet, offering a locket as payment for safe passage from the city. 

“I remember you,” she had begun. “You were friends with my father. You used to come into the Rose with him when he wanted to see us.” 

He hadn’t known that the girl had been aware of him, though they had been introduced a time or two, short nod from him and a curious but nervous gaze from her. It wasn’t safe anymore, she told him. She was eighteen now -and how the years had gone so quickly he didn’t understand- and the Templars were steadily gaining power. She was more afraid for her father than for herself, the little fool. 

Olivia hadn’t even told her mother of her plans, left her a note explaining so she wouldn’t be stopped, one for her father tucked carefully in her pocket. With all his coin gone and his stomach rumbling, for food veins throbbing for Dust, he opened his palm and let her drop the locket into his filthy hand. 

Reiner was a smuggler Samson had worked with on a few occasions. He was always happy to take on a little mageling refugee. It was the right thing to do, he had told Samson when asked why he was so eager to offer his assistance. And what was more, he was cheaper than some of the other routes. Olivia’s locket was plain - it wouldn’t get him much when he pawned it for coin and the less he had to spend to get the girl out, the more he would have to keep for himself. Though Olivia was clearly nervous and mistrusting of the smuggler, Samson gave her the warmest smile he could manage and asked her to trust him, that she’d be safe. He watched the girl allow Reiner to take her wrist and tug her along, Thrask’s eyes flashing him one last worried look before she turned to go.

Samson didn’t think anything of it, didn’t often think about the magelings he helped once they were on their way to freedom until a Ferelden with a bird’s name showed up, looking menacing and demanding to know the location of a mage half-breed Samson had sent away a few days before. The boy hadn’t had anything on him that could be of use, no coin or jewels or even decent weapons he could pawn, and Samson had sent to Reiner only out of pity to beg his way onto a ship. 

It wasn’t until after the Hawke’s visit that panic started to set in. How many mageling children had he sent to Reiner because he was the easiest and cheapest and eager, overly so it seemed to him in hindsight, who had ended up sold into slavery or worse. No wonder Reiner had taken them all for such few coin if he was selling them at higher prices in Tevinter. Samson felt sick with the worry and hoped the Ferelden would be able to do more than a washed up former Templar could to save them.

 

**__________**

 

Samson was too much of a coward to tell Thrask what had become of Olivia. And more than that, he didn’t think he could make himself say the words.  _I sold your daughter to slavers. She was so terrified that she let a demon tempt her. And now she’s dead. Because of me._ Thrask deserved to be told by someone who gave a damn but not the piece of shit who was responsible.

He’d gone to the warehouse after sending the Ferelden that direction, heart heavy and stomach in knots, to find the room littered with rotting corpses. Curled in a corner had been the remains of an abomination and Samson knew with a sick certainty that the abomination had been the once warm-hearted Olivia who had been foolish enough to trust him. 

Samson had thought nothing that magic did could upset him anymore. Not after years of being a Templar and facing down blood mages, abominations, and the solemn blank-eyed Tranquils. Not after _Maddox_. He’d seen the worst of both mages and Templars. But the young girl’s body, perverted and mutilated on the floor of a slaver’s warehouse twisted his stomach and he found himself on his knees and retching up what little food he had eaten with the coin meant to save her. 

Samson hadn’t prayed in a long time. Prayers hadn’t helped when he was mad with the Thirst for Lyrium, begging in the chokedamp. They hadn’t helped when he had pleaded with the Maker to protect Maddox. The Maker had abandoned him, abandoned the mages and the Templars both. Samson believed in the Maker, the benevolent creator he had been promised to from a young age, but the Maker certainly didn’t believe in him. 

He still found himself kneeling by the mangled remains of a sweet girl, shaking hands touching her cool corpse and praying, mouth moving silently in words drilled into his head and his heart from years in the Order, and pleading and beseeching that the Maker take her into his arms despite her desperate and terrified pact with the demon. She deserved so much more than this.

They hadn't even spoken, Thrask and himself, in months, not since Samson had stumbled, Lyrium-drunk and screaming, into the Gallows and tried to strangle him, bone-thin fingers grasping weakly for his throat and howling like a wounded dog. The grief of seeing Maddox had driven him wild with anguish and he had held Thrask responsible for not telling him the boy's fate. And for his weakness, Samson would leave Thrask to the same painful end.

 

But the Ferelden rogue with the bird name who had come across the group while saving Feynriel, successfully thank the Maker, one less mageling child's blood on his hands, must have been the one to share the news. Olivia had written her mother a goodbye letter before coming to Samson for help, it made since that she may have written her father as well. And so it was Thrask who came looking for Samson.

The older Templar didn't speak, didn't even really look at Samson, sitting slumped in a damp corner near the stairs leading to Darktown. He just grabbed his old friend by the arm and dragged him along, disappearing down the stairs and into the shadows. And Samson let himself be led; not the march of a sheep to slaughter but of a murderer to the gallows. 

 

Templars weren't common in Darktown and around them people scattered -smugglers, thieves, and urchin children alike- and where they stepped the path cleared. The harsh look on Thrask's face didn't help, nor did the sullen and silent hopelessness on Samson's own. A few pitying glances were thrown Samson’s way but he ignored them and no one reached out to offer assistance. Templars weren’t well-liked but they commanded respect and fear and no one interfered. 

 

The pair reached an empty hovel where slavers occasionally kept their captives chained. Thrask pushed inside, gentler than he'd have done himself if their positions were reversed but still hard enough to knock the imbalanced and aching Samson to the dirt floor, and turned to bar the thin wooden door. The blood drained from Samson's face and he swallowed thickly. It wasn't that he was particularly keen on his life, groveling in the chokedamp and strung out and in pain every waking moment of his life, but this wasn't how he had pictured it coming to an end, when he had let himself dream of an end to it all.

 

He wouldn't fight, Samson decided, as Thrask's gauntleted hand reached for his hip where his sword was sheathed. He deserved this after everything he'd done. All the mages in the Circle he hadn’t helped and so many he had. Olivia. Feynriel.  _Maddox_. _Oh Maddox._

 

Samson closed his eyes and waited for the blows to fall only to hear a rough and broken sound, the skeleton of a forced laugh, and sagged beside him on the ground, shoving something heavy and sloshing into his hand. When he opened his eyes again, he was a holding a bottle of dwarven whiskey - strong and dark and tempting. Thrask ordered him to drink and he wasn’t in a place to deny him anything at all he might have asked for, especially not something so much kinder than he deserved. Thrask should be hurting him, hitting him, not offering him a reprieve from the crushing guilt in the form of a large bottle of questionable alcohol.

  
“I’d have rather you hit me, to be honest,” Samson murmured, though he accepted the whiskey that was offered and uncorked it clumsily, tipping the bottle into his suddenly desperately parched throat. It was good and strong, flooding him with a warmth not entirely unlike the Lyrium, watered down.

Thrask looked up abruptly, meeting Samson’s eyes for the first time since dragging him down into Darktown. “I’m not in the mood to give you what you want, Samson.” 

There wasn’t much he could say to that and so he nodded silently and took another long drink before Thrask was reaching for to take the bottle from him and tilt the contents into his own mouth. They sat in silence, backs against the filth and muck-coated walls of Darktown, passing the heavy -steadily growing lighter- bottle back and forth between them until the alcohol had made them soft and sad and quiet. 

With liquor-loosened lips, Samson closed his eyes and let his body go slack and limp against the dust and dirt of the floor. He could feel Thrask do the same until they were lying side by side. Outside the door, urchins were scampering around in the filth, waiting for one of them to come out so they could loot the body of the other. At his side, Thrask was lying in a similar position. The alcohol-dulled tension between them filled the small room until Samson could barely breath. 

“Thrask?” He murmured, not quite recognizing the meek quality of his own voice. He waited until the Templar acknowledged the break in their silence with a grunt before continuing. “I’m sorry.” They weren’t two words that came to him easily, that came to him at all really. “I’m so sorry about Olivia.” He’d been trying not to say the girl’s name, not _think_ her name up until that point. His eyes were damp, hands coming up and clawing at his face as the breath stopped in his chest and he choked on it. 

He was met with silence for several long minutes, the only noise in the room his own shaking rasping breaths catching in his throat and clogging his mouth. He could feel Thrask’s entire body hitch on a swelling sob beside him and it made him want to curl in on himself, the shame of everything he had done, but his body was too lax to obey him. 

“I’m sorry about Maddox.”

 

**__________**

 

The worst part of the withdrawal wasn’t the pain, the headaches that grounded Samson entirely for days at a time. It wasn’t the voices, nightmares from the Order and after that hounded him day and night or the bone-deep exhaustion and need that was driving him mad. It was the way time was slipping between his weak fingers and he would wake up one morning to find a month, two, a year, had passed since he had closed his eyes. It was terrifying to lose so much time to catch his own face in a reflective mirror and window and see that, beneath the grime of the city and the weight of addiction, he had _aged_ with absolutely no recollection of when or for how long.

Other times things passed and he was only tangentially aware of them, as if he were underwater and everything was happening above ground. His connection to the world was dulled and desensitized. The Ferelden with the bird name left Lowtown, and Samson often heard his name spoken in favor. The Qunari, who had never bothered him or paid him any attention on the docks, ransacked the city. Where was he when that happened? He hadn’t fought, hadn’t had the mind or the strength, but he remembered, as if from a dream, watching the city burn, the noble corralled in the Viscount’s Keep and when everything was over the Hawke stepped out, Champion or Kirkwall, and the Viscount Dumar was dead.

Samson had no close connection with Viscount, sometimes seeing the man going about his business when he lived in the keep himself as a city guardsman. He’d been under the thumb of the Knight Commander Meredith but now without him there was nothing to keep the woman in check. 

Meredith tightened the noose around around mage -and every Templar- in the entire city and with throats closing, clamped beneath her iron grip, they fought harder for each breath, for each inch of freedom and found themselves a number of surprising allies as the years went on.

 

**__________**

 

Somehow against all odds, Samson ended up a part of the Mage Underground. It was run by that Darktown healer who hated him for not being a martyr and helping everyone for free, for his mistakes with Reiner and Feynriel and Olivia, but he wasn’t in a position to deny anyone willing to get their hands dirty and desperate enough to take all the help he can get. Mages needed to get out of the Gallows and away from the Knight-Commander’s growing madness. 

He and Thrask and a handful of other kind-hearted Templar kids tired of the blood on their hands and the Knight-Commander’s blind accusations, knew the routes and patrols, knew most of the secret entrances and were able to steal away some of the mages in the night, to drag them far enough down the Storm Coast that others were unlikely to be found by the Templar Mage-Hunters. 

Thrask had built up a relationship with some of the mages, Alain and Grace in particular, from his earlier attempts to help them. Thrask was not at all the Templar Samson had known in his days with the Order. He had always been kind, but firm. He hadn’t always approved of Samson’s little favors for their mageling charges, but since the death of his daughter and the tightening fist of the Knight-Commander he had become almost as temperamental as their healer leader. 

During their latest escape attempt, the mage Grace had managed to kidnap their Ferelden Champion’s little dwarf friend. Samson had seen him around, the loud storymaker with a beard on his chest instead of his face who had a permanent room in the Hanged Man and who played cards with Thrask since Samson’s expulsion from the order. He wondered how Thrask had possibly gone along with the kidnapping of his acquaintance, especially if it was to draw the Champion’s ire; they had seen the Ferelden bird defeat the Qunari leader and face down more blood mages and abominations than any Templar in the Gallows had in their lives during his short years in the city. 

Though Samson had been uncomfortable with the situation, he remained at Thrask’s side, wanting to see through the escape of the mages whose names were on the list to be made Tranquil do to their nightly activities. He had failed Maddox, he didn’t want to fail anyone else. But when Grace drew a silver dagger across her wrist and called to the power in her blood, Samson found himself stumbling back in fear and disgust. He turned his eyes to Thrask, who gazed back at him resolutely and unfazed. It wasn’t new, the blood magic, and Thrask had known all along. He wasn’t the Templar, wasn’t the man, Samson had known and befriended. 

Too much a Templar even after all those years, after all the Order had done to him and those he loved, to abide by blood magic and demons, Samson turned and walked away. He ran into the Champion on his way back toward the city and pointed him in the right direction.

Getting Rutherford felt like the betrayal it was and how it sickened him to have to call the Templar -Knight Captain since his involvement with Samson’s expulsion because of course the bastard got a promotion for ratting Samson out- _sir_ , and lead him to the mages. But when they arrived, out of breath and swords drawn, only the Champion and his friends and the boy Alain were left. Thrask lay in a pool of blood near the abomination he was certain had been Grace only a half hour before. 

The Champion told -not asked but ordered- Rutherford to leave Alain be, to take him up to the Circle quietly and gently and let him alone. And though Rutherford asked the Ferelden’s advice on what to do with Samson himself, for he had proved himself to still have the Templar’s mettle, for a moment he thought the Champion might recommend giving him back his Sunburst shield and Sword of Mercy, but the Ferelden just eyed him, contempt clear on his foreigner’s face, and shook his head telling the Knight-Captain to do whatever he wanted. It wasn’t enough of a commendation to put shield in his hand and Lyrium in his belly.

When Rutherford walked off, Samson stayed behind. Someone had to give Thrask a proper burial.

 

**__________**

 

Samson was standing on the docks when the ground starts to rumble. There was fighting in the Gallows, he knew. That Orsino was a good sort and he wanted to help his mages, but the way he provoked Meredith openly in front of the entire city would only lead to bloodshed. After what he’d seen on the Wounded Coast, with Thrask’s death… He wasn’t sure how involved he wanted to be anymore. The Chantry was _wrong_ but the mages they were saving kept turning to blood magic and he wondered if it, if anything, was really worth it anymore. 

And then the ground began to shake and he looked up in time to see the Chanty blast apart, as if in slow motion, from across the docks. The explosion rocked Samson enough to knock him to his knees and he couldn’t think. He could imagine, later when he had time to reflect on that moment, what had caused it: the Darktown healer had been growing erratic, desperate. It was magic that caused the explosion and magelings who would pay for it. 

But in that moment with the fire rising and people screaming, there was only one thought tearing through Samson’s mind.

_Maddox_. He had to find _Maddox._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What even are timelines. No I definitely didn't just skip 3/4ths of Dragon Age II with handwavey withdrawal logic.


	3. Kiss on the Crown

Fire. Smoke. Ash. 

 

Blood. Screaming. 

 

The heady stench of death and decay.

 

_Chaos_. 

 

**__________**

The entire city was aflame. It may have begun with the Chantry’s explosion but months later Kirkwall burned with the threat of an all-out war. The city was almost cleaned out of mages, those in the Circle put to the sword by the Right of Annulment and the city’s Templars were facing instead the enraged loved ones of those magelings whose blood had wet their swords. 

 

The Knight-Commander had thought the city’s people would demand the blood of the mages in retribution for the death of the Grand Cleric Elthina and the other innocents who had died in the explosion. She hadn’t been wrong, many of the faithful had cried out for justice and rallied behind the Templars when they brought down their swords on the cowering mages of the Circle. But just as many had risen up to defend their children, their loved ones locked away who had been charged with a crime the Circle hadn’t committed. One mad mage lashing out at the oppressive boot of the Chantry pressing down on the throats of all the mages of Thedas shouldn’t be a death sentence for anyone in the city born with the Maker’s Curse.

 

And so the city itself was at war even as news poured in from all sides of growing mage rebellions across all of Thedas. Enough mages had escaped the Sword of Mercy to spread the word of the fate of the Kirkwall Gallows and to light the fire of rebellion. 

 

The Templars hellbent on carrying out Knight-Commander Meredith’s last command invaded every home and hovel in Kirkwall’s Hightown, Lowtown, and Darktown, looking for young apostates to drag into the streets and execute. There was little effort by the remaining Templars, even those who did not agree with such violent actions, to protest and the people of Kirkwall were largely left to defend themselves and their children alone. 

 

It was likely only through his profound knowledge of the streets of Kirkwall that allowed Samson to keep Maddox safe from them at all. He had tried to get the boy out of the city, along with the few remaining members of the Mage Underground scrambling to find the straggling apostates before the Templars could get a hold of them, lock them in chains or worse, and usher them out to the relative safety of the countryside. But Tranquil were not well-liked or accepted even among their mage brothers and sisters and Maddox had quietly requested to stay at Samson’s side in spite of the danger. 

 

Someday Samson would look back on that moment and hate himself for not forcing Maddox to get out of the city and away from all of the Templars, including - _especially_ \- himself. But he had never been able to say no to his Maddox. 

 

**__________**

 

The moment Samson had felt the rumbling of the explosion, had looked up to find the eery red glow of the magic that ripped apart the Chantry and the rubble raining down, his first thought had been of Maddox. Knight-Commander Meredith had been looking for a reason to annul the Circle’s mages for years, certainly since Samson had been kicked out nearly seven years before and in Samson’s opinion, probably ever since she had been appointment Knight-Commander in the first place. The explosion had almost certainly been caused by the Mage Underground’s de facto leader, the Healer of Darktown whose sanity had been slowly deteriorating over the years of failed attempts to rescue his fellow mages from the hell that was the Gallows. 

 

Samson knew that though the Circle had not been involved in the attack on the Chantry, it was the little magelings inside who would shoulder the blame. Meredith finally had reason to annul the Gallows under the guise of the magical involvement of the explosion. It wouldn’t matter to her -or likely to the Divine either if the lack of interference in Meredith’s cruel ways over the last decade or so told him anything- that the Circle was innocent and one person was responsible. She would see it through. And though the Tranquil were not capable of using magic, of being possessed by demons, the Templars would not spare them. They would not spare Maddox. Everything Samson had done that had led to Maddox being branded under the Rite of Tranquility, he couldn’t allow Maddox to die by the Sword of Mercy - not if there was anything at all he could do to save him.

 

**__________**

 

The city was soundless following the destruction of the Chantry, as if the blast had coated the streets with silencing charm as well as the debris. Even Samson’s footsteps seemed muted as he made his way, running as quickly as his aching bones would allow and then some, toward the Gallows. The years on the streets, hiding from debt-collecting Dust dealer thugs and Coterie assassins looking for easy pockets to pick, had taught Samson more about the city’s dark corners and secret passages than over two decades in service for the Order. 

 

There was a a narrow path deep beneath the sewers of Darktown that would allow him to reach the Gallows before Knight-Commander Meredith could take action as long as the Champion was able to stall her orders for even a few scant minutes. Few Templars knew of the connection between Darktown and the Gallows except those who had joined the Mage Underground to help others escape. Samson wondered if any of them would start squealing about the passage when they turned their backs on the mages following the attack. 

 

He found the path blessedly clear of Templars, but more worryingly clear of mages as well. He had expected the First Enchanter to send the young magelings through to at least try for their safety. But if Samson’s years of experience were correct in that the Bitch-Commander Meredith would call for the Right of Annulment before the Chantry embers had cooled, it wasn’t unrealistic that the First Enchanter would know he needed every hint of magic he could get - even from the little magelings. He knew _he_ would rather go out fighting, if he had the choice when the Maker took his last breath from his lungs and he could imagine the mages, even the young ones, apprenticed and un-Harrowed, would feel the same. Certainly enough of them had chosen death over the skeleton of a life the Circle had pushed upon them. 

 

When Samson pushed through the entrance the the tunnel he found the clearing empty and beyond it, mages and Templars alike were still caught staring at the sky. It had been only minutes since the explosion and no orders yet had been given or carried out. He wanted to scream at the fool mages to move, to run. They wouldn’t survive an all-out assault on the Circle, but he didn’t want to draw the attention of the Templar Knights either. Instead, he crept through the shadows and along the walls until he reached the smithy where he prayed Maddox would still be. If the boy had been out selling wares or Maker fucking forbid anywhere near the Chantry itself, everything Samson was risking would be for naught. 

 

Samson could have collapsed with relief when he pushed through the tent flaps to find Maddox looking at him with that chillingly calm gaze. Without waiting for a reaction Maddox wasn’t capable of giving him anyway, he grabbed the smith’s wrist and dragged him wordlessly from the tent. Maddox didn’t offer up a fight; if he had seen what had just transpired in Hightown then even with his emotions taken from him, he must have known what was coming for the mages of the Circle. 

 

Maddox didn’t speak until the pair had passed the other mages and Templars, who were finally beginning to move, panicking mostly and thankfully too much to notice the wayward ex-Templar and Tranquil weaving their way through the shadows, and reached the passage back to Darktown. 

 

“They mean to kill us, do they not, Knight-Templar Samson?” He asked in that dull voice, as if he had commented on an oddly shaped cloud in the sky or a ship on the horizon instead of the impending slaughter of hundreds of his kin. “They mean to invoke the Right of Annulment.” It was the way of the Tranquil to approach even subjects such as their own torture and death with a chilling calm and quiet, with logic. The Lyrium brand cut them off from their dreams, from the Fade and from their magic but also from the ability to _feel_. And though Samson had seen it too damned many times under Meredith’s command, it still made him ache to hear it from Maddox. 

 

There was no point in lying. He’d never actually been that good at it to begin with -no poker face to save his life Thrask had always said- and he didn’t want to ever lie to Maddox, who had been lied to his entire life. He gave a solemn nod as they waited in the darkness for a few urchins to pass by. There was a cellar entrance not far where he could hide Maddox until the worst of the slaughter was over and go from there. The mansion in Hightown the cellar belonged to was largely empty most months of the year, owned probably by some rich pompous ass in another city. Samson had often taken advantage of the cellar though he hadn’t chanced venturing into the house itself after hearing the servants scrambling about. 

 

Once Maddox was carefully hidden amongst the wine barrels and and old chests, Samson turned to sit himself and wait out the awful carnage that was sure to come when he found Maddox’s hand clamped tight around his arm. Though there was no emotion on the mage’s face when Samson turned back to him in surprise, there was a firmer quality in his voice than he had ever heard from a Tranquil mage. 

 

“What of the others? They will not survive this any more than I would have.” When he received no response from the gaping former Templar, who stared at him helplessly and desperately, Maddox went on. “I do not wish to die. The others do not as well. I am…grateful that you have given me back my life.” 

 

“I _took_ your life!” Samson half-shouted, frustration and panic building in his chest and blocking his throat. He quickly lowered his voice, pulling Maddox closer. “What happened to you was _my_ fault, Maddox. I don’t want to be some bloody hero, kid, I just want to keep you safe.” Sure, he had helped other mages in the past but look where it had gotten him - gotten them _both_. Helping Circle magelings had gotten him kicked out, brain addled with withdrawal and Maddox turned into a _thing_ to be mined. Helping the Mage Underground had gotten Thrask killed and blood mages set loose and now the Chantry was in smoldering pieces at the hands of a mage _he_ had helped. 

 

It wasn’t possible for Maddox to be disappointed in Samson, not anymore, and he knew the silence between them was just that - silence. But the guilt rose in Samson like the swelling sea when he gazed into the blank brown eyes and remembered how they had once shone and sparked with life, and then his eyes fell upon the Lyrium brand marring Maddox’s forehead and he knew the battle was already lost. He had to try, even all it got him was a fireball to the back or a Sword of Mercy to the gut. He had to save them - for Maddox.

 

Resigned and determined all the same, he reached to push Maddox back into the shadows. “Stay here,” he ordered. “If you hear anyone coming from upstairs, you hide. If you see anyone coming through the door who isn’t a mage or me, you fucking hide, do you hear me?” Tranquil weren’t known for their heroic acts of course but he wouldn’t put it past Maddox to see the logic in attacking a Templar -without or without any damned magic- to keep another mage safe. He waited until the Tranquil nodded, until that heart-wrenchingly blank voice was murmuring his assent, to turn away back through the cellar door. 

 

If passing letters back and forth between Mea and Maddox had been stupid and dangerous, going back into the Gallows, as a former Templar and just as the Right of Annulment was about to be carried out didn’t even register on the scale. Samson had no weapons, no sword or shield to protect and defend, and his body still, _always_ , ached with the lack of Lyrium in his veins but he had nothing stashed away and certainly no time to try and barter or threaten the Dust dealers before heading back through the passage to the Gallows. Samson cursed himself for having buried Thrask with his sunburst shield and sword of mercy - the weapons would do Samson a hell of a lot more good than Thrask in that moment.

 

Panic had settled over the city like a choking fog in the short time since he had grabbed Maddox and hidden him away. It was the blind panic of lambs knowing they were going to slaughter with not enough sense or will to fight back. The magelings were backing away through the Gallows courtyard and into the prison itself, cornering themselves because they thought -they _knew_ \- that there was nowhere to run. From his vantage point hiding in the shadowed path, Samson could hear the screaming and clanging of swords, smell the electric ozone that permeated the air whenever magic was performed. 

 

Just as Samson decided to chance it and leave the safety of the tunnel to grab every mage he could manage, a small group of Templars burst into the courtyard. They looked more frightened than menacing but it didn’t stop most of them from advancing on the magelings. Samson recognized one, barely eighteen and newly knighted, as an awkward and knock-kneed kid he had befriended so many years ago when he had first come to the Order at nine or ten years old. _Wystan._

 

The boy looked sick to his stomach, sword-hand shaking. He looked as if he were about to rattle right out of his armor and when Samson hissed his name, the boy turned to find him with wide wet eyes. The spark of recognition took a moment but he glanced quickly around before scampering over.

 

“Get out of here.” 

 

Wystan stared uncomprehendingly and Samson repeated the order. He was a kid, barely older than some of the magelings they were about to put to the sword. The boy had never had blood on his hands and annulling the Circle, slaughtering them all, wasn’t the way he would let the boy begin it. 

 

“We have orders,” the kid whispered back, “the Knight-Commander… The _Grand Cleric_ is…” Wystan trailed off, looking over his shoulder where his fellow Templar-Knights were chasing the frightened mages further into the prison that would likely be their tomb. “I don’t know what to do, Samson.” And he looked so young - _was_ so young- in that moment that Samson found himself reaching for the kid’s sword. He knew the kid had joined the Order because he wanted to protect mages, the idealistic childish little fool. He couldn’t let Wystan do this.

 

“Give me your sword and get out of here. You don’t want to do this. You’re not like this.” And though he half expected Wystan to put up more of a fight, Samson counted himself lucky that the boy hadn’t been fully knight for long enough to lose his humanity as the sword was pressed carefully into his waiting hand. He jerked his head toward the tunnel, told the boy to grab any mages if he wanted them to see the light of day and to get the hell out. 

 

Samson doubted he’d be as lucky with any of the other Templars he would come across, but at least there was one less to worry about hurting the mages - and one less kid plagued with guilt and self-loathing over the orders of the Knight-Commander. Adjusting his grip on the borrowed sword, Samson followed behind the other Templars quietly into through the courtyard and into the prison. What he found inside nearly floored him.

 

Two decades serving the Templar Order and seven years on the streets had given Samson his fair share of battles and blood, but the sight that greeted him inside the prison was enough to make him want to turn back and flee to Darktown, beg for enough Lyrium to make him forget the horrific scene. The floor was littered with bodies of young mages, most not yet harrowed -mere _children_ who would never have stood a chance against fully-armored and Lyrium-powered Templar Knights. There were several armored bodies he knew belonged to Templars, frozen or burned by frantic and terrified attempts at magic to defend themselves, one Samson was sure the First Enchanter must have gotten to, its crushed corpse thrown nearly through the wall with magnificent force, but the bodies of Templars were greatly outnumbered by their mageling charges. 

 

He was too late. Maddox had sent him to save more of his brethren, had believed he could do it and he had come too late. He had failed. Even those Templar Knights he had followed inside, who had barely hesitated before taking the lives of the magelings still in the courtyard, faltered at the sight, some swearing quietly, more than one ripping at their helmets to retch in a corner at the horror of it all. 

 

Beyond though, Samson could hear voices, shouting that echoed through the Templar Hall from the courtyard within. He pushed past the still-awed and sick Templar Knights, who for the most part ignored him and made his way further into the prison. There were more bodies in the hall, more Templars this time as well as the corpses of demons and abominations as the cornered mages had turned to the forbidden magic of which they were accused in the first place. 

 

The Knight-Commander was facing down the Champion of Kirkwall and his band of merry men who looked bloodied and weary from defending -failing to defend as much as Samson had- the mages inside. Behind Meredith stood the rest of the Order, hands on their swords, with Rutherford standing proud at her side. And because finding new levels of stupidity when it came to mages seemed to be Samson’s forte, he found himself descending the courtyard steps and taking his place at the Ferelden’s side. Unarmored and out of practice with an ill-fitting sword to face down the entire Templar Order -old friends and companions as well as enemies. Samson just hoped someone would find Maddox and take care of him. Keep him safe. He hoped Maddox might get word that he at least went out trying to make things right. 

 

The ensuing fight was like nothing Samson had ever experienced, even with Rutherford -the bloody coward- changing sides at the last second, finally opening his eyes to the Knight-Commander’s madness and drawing the rest of the Order to the Champion’s side. That sword of hers, glowing, _singing_ to him across the courtyard battlefield, had power he had never seen. Pure Lyrium, she called it, and stroked it like a lover until it seemed to _breathe_ for her and she for it. 

 

The Knight-Commander’s voice howled around the courtyard, “ _Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter._ ” She was screaming the Canticle of Benedictions as their forces began to drive her back. She was _mad_ with it, more than any of the old, Lyrium-weakened Templars Samson had seen retire from the Order, more than he himself had been on his worst days when time had no meaning and the world was built on pain. 

 

And then she stumbled away from them, crying out to the Maker as her very skin began to glow, crackling as if the strange red Lyrium in her sword where inside her and shining through her flesh and her eyes. Meredith wailed as she collapsed, body frozen and still singing that awful lilting tune as she _crystallized_ before their eyes and her corpse a flaming statue, solidified. 

 

**__________**

 

Samson hadn’t expected to live through the battle and certainly hadn’t expected to be allowed to leave with the Champion when Rutherford backed down at the end of the fight. He and the Ferelden didn’t speak, simply sharing a nod -of gratitude, of grief, of understanding- before parting ways. The Hawke had many things to deal with, knowing that though the Knight-Commander was dead, the war of Kirkwall was likely just beginning and he had a certain healer-turned-terrorist lover to handle on the horizon. 

 

When he slipped inside the Darktown cellar, Samson did not immediately see Maddox and his heart plummeted into his stomach. Everything he had risked, everything he had done only for Maddox to have been found out and dragged away, possibly dead in an alley or a muck-covered corner? He cried out for the Tranquil, unable to keep the panic from his voice or control the crackling volume. And receiving no answer he shouted again before he heard his name murmured softly in that flat tone. He had hated it before but in that moment Maddox’s voice, even blank and slow, was the most beautiful sound, and he found himself throwing his arms around the younger mage, muffling the dry sob of guilt and relief that broke from his throat by burying his face in Maddox’s robes to hold him tight.

 

“I am all right, Samson,” he heard, as the Tranquil’s arms found their way around his shoulders to hold him back just as tight. “You have kept me safe.” 

 

Samson clutched and clung to Maddox for nearly an hour after, shaking quietly in the dark shadows of the cellar with his damp face pressed to the boy’s neck and shoulder, everything coming crashing down at once. The Chantry was gone and the Grand Cleric dead. And _all those little mages_ had paid the price of one apostate’s choices. All those mages he hadn’t been able to save even if he _had_ been able to save his Maddox. And that thing that Meredith had become. Samson could still hear its Lyrium call, touching the marrow of bones and pulling at him. It was too much, everything he had seen and heard. Everything he had failed to do. He had saved one mage and one Templar from an awful fate and watched the rest slaughtered before his eyes. 

 

Maddox held him, murmuring platitudes in that blank monotone that made him shiver more than it offered comfort, until exhaustion took them both and the ended up curled on the floor of the cellar, Samson leaning back against the damp wall with Maddox’s head in his lap, stroking over the boy’s shaved scalp with his bony, shaking fingers.

 

**__________**

 

Samson awoke more often than not in a cold sweat, the ache of withdrawal crushing his bones, and reaching desperately for Maddox. Lyrium kept the nightmares at bay and though he had frequently been plagued with the terrors over the years since his expulsion from the Order, they had only grown worse since the Chantry explosion. Maddox had always featured prominently in the night terrors but ever since he had witnessed the final cruelty of the Right of Annulment, the desperate and frantic actions of the mages falling prey to the demons in a futile attempt to save themselves, he had been plagued by his failure to save them all. 

 

Maddox was always nearby, requiring so little sleep as a Tranquil and when Samson would awake with a sharp gasp, fingers reaching out in desperation and fear, the boy would be there to allow the grasping fingers to find him, take a seat at his friend’s side and remind him that they were safe. The _he_ was safe.

 

It was odd to be on the receiving end of a comfort he didn’t deserve, to be comforted by _Maddox_ of all people, the mage he had failed so many times in so many ways. Any strength or courage that may have let him draw away and handle the pain and fear himself turned tail and ran when Maddox’s long fingers found his own and gently squeezed, when his own hand found its way to Maddox’s chest to feel the slow steady beat of his heart and count the gentle pulse until his own heart slowed to match it. 

 

It wasn’t just visions of failure and worrying about Maddox that tormented Samson. Though he had initially believed he was too late and all the mages of the Gallows had been slaughtered, he had later discovered that many of them had gotten out before he had returned from rescuing Maddox and many more had found clever places to hide on their own until the worst of the fighting had passed and they had found their way out of the Gallows and for many of them out of the city to spread the word of the mage rebellion. War would soon cover all of Thedas if the Order didn’t get the mages under control and Samson could not imagine what that would look like, the amount of blood that would be spilt. 

 

Just in Kirkwall the fighting was enough to stall the flow of Lyrium to both the Chantry and the Dust dealers of Darktown. More and more Samson was needing to spend nights curled up and trying to ward off the pain instead of searching for food and water for them both. When it had just been himself on the streets he hadn’t been as concerned about starving to death but having Maddox at his side, being responsible for the Tranquil, he knew he needed to force himself up and out searching; he couldn’t protect Maddox from the Templars and blood mages and demons if he couldn’t raise his damned head for weakness from lack of food or withdrawal.

 

Though Maddox kept offering to out in search of food and water, Samson knew he could not allow the Tranquil to do so. The Lyrium brand kept him from reaching for the Fade, from conjuring fireballs or demons or freezing his enemies solid, kept him entirely harmless, but the Templars roaming through the city with swords out and ready would not have cared about that. They would have seen a mage and in Maddox’s blank face they would have found the Darktown Healer’s and cut him down without thought or remorse.

 

If Maddox had been capable of the emotion, Samson imaged he would have been annoyed with Samson’s adamant demand that he stay tucked away and safe. He had never been passive as a mage, a bright and happy boy eager to help, but with his emotions taken away and only cold logic in its place, Maddox knew the risks involved. He was a mage, magic abilities or not; it was Kirkwall, overrun with frightened and aimless Templars. He would almost certainly die if he stepped foot where Samson was not there to protect him. And so he allowed his friend to carefully hide him during the day while he went out in search of news, of food, of drops of Lyrium, and came back to him at night to shake and sweat in the darkness.

 

**__________**

 

With no Knight-Commander to lead them, the remaining Templars turned to their Knight-Captain Rutherford for guidance. Though he had relieved Meredith of her command when she turned on the Champion of Kirkwall, the Ferelden had thus far been reluctant to take up the mantle of Knight-Commander. He seemed lost on the occasions when Samson would catch a glimpse of him, more so even than when he had first come to the Gallows, a jumpy and gaunt kid haunted by the memories of what he had seen at the Circle Tower of Ferelden. Samson wondered if the annulment of the Gallows had brought rushing back those memories of Kinloch Hold: so much death and demons and blood. 

 

Though Rutherford had made his feelings toward the mages clear over the years, his resolve appeared to be faltering in the aftermath of the Annulment. He had never, to Samson’s knowledge, abused mages himself in the Gallows, but he had turned a blind eye when presented with the abuse and had even been vocally supportive of further Templar cruelty. Several years before, Samson had heard of the Knight-Captain’s support of the Templar Otto Alrik’s “Tranquil Solution” that even the Knight-Commander had thrown out as radical and extremist, and nearly marched, weakened as he had been by starvation and withdrawal, to punch the Ferelden prick in the face. But now he looked like the lost boy he used to be, staring helplessly at the sea of fighting mages and Templars, knowing the side he had been trained to fight for had had their faith shaken by Meredith’s madness.

 

Many of the Templars who had only stepped down in the final battle against Meredith’s madness and allowed the Champion and his companions to walk away free out of their grudging respect for Rutherford, were the ones who had made it their mission to track down and kill all the hidden magelings and apostates in the city, to purge all of Kirkwall of magic. Rutherford likely had the power to stop them, command them to stay their hands and they would listen to their de facto Knight-Commander. But while he did nothing to encourage them further or sanction their actions as far as Samson could tell, Rutherford would not order them to desist either. 

 

It got so bad between the rebel mages, the citizens protecting them, and the Templars that Rutherford started to call for anyone who might ever had held the Sword of Mercy to arms and that got Samson’s attention. With the turmoil in the city it had become more and more difficult to get ahold of the Dust. Even the Lyrium smugglers whose entire job it was to bring it into the city were finding their paths blocked by the war and Orzammar’s reluctance to get involved with the divided city without a clear advantage to supporting it, clear benefits to themselves for their efforts. Joining Rutherford’s sad little band of Templar has-beens would mean at least a few drops of sweet clear blue in veins, but it would also mean putting the apostates to the sword. 

 

“They’re blood mages,” he reasoned to Maddox as he tucked the Tranquil into another safe hiding place to wait for him. “They’re maleficarum and they’re dangerous. Hurting people. I’m not hunting down innocent little magelings.” And Maddox would watch him go with that calm blank gaze and Samson would get the feeling that he was betraying his friend. 

 

He _loved_ Maddox - maybe now the affection was tinged with the guilt and responsibility that tugged at his heart at what had become of his friend at his own actions, but he had found the love was still there, a half-unwanted and certainly unreturned flutter in his heart when he looked at the boy. But love could not drown out the thirst for the Dust. He wasn’t strong enough for that. Nothing was stronger than that, Samson had learned over the years. Not love, not honor, not the desperate desire to be good and clean and _worthy_. The Dust drained it all away and replaced it with the violent need for it above everything else. 

 

And so Samson stood before the man who had turned him in and facilitated his removal from the Order, his homelessness and addiction. The man who had stood by when Meredith pressed the hot Lyrium brand to Maddox’s face and taken away all that made him human. And he accepted the sunburst shield and sword of mercy and turned on the mages he had once tried to save, all for a sweet taste of the glistening blue. 

 

He came stumbling back, blissful with the lilting song of it in his veins -much purer than the Dust he could get his hands on from Darktown, and was almost soaring high enough that he didn’t care about the blood on his sword that he had exchanged for it. But when he reached the hovel where he had stashed Maddox, the edge of the song faded to a hum and he found he couldn’t look his friend in the eye. 

 

Maddox wouldn’t say a word of course and it would make Samson feel all the more guilty. Even with the Lyrium lulling his senses he would awake crying out into the night, sleep dogged by the faces of the mages -even those turning to blood magic in their anger and fear- so clear as they begged for mercy and he cut them down, in his sleep. Maddox would still be there at his side, a calming presence with his gentle silence, and Samson knew he would not be able to keep it up for long. The Chantry’s supply of Lyrium would run dry eventually and he would lose the incentive to stay at Rutherford’s side and do his bidding. 

 

He wondered sometimes how many other Templars felt the same way. When the Lyrium was gone, what would hold them all here? They Chantry couldn’t get more to them while the war was raging on and if what they were hearing of uprisings all across Thedas were true, the flow of Lyrium could be stalled all over the country. The mages would have to secure their own line of it to continue replenish their mana when sleep and food were not available to do it naturally, or if they wanted to attempt anything seriously damaging. What then would come of the war if neither side could fuel their abilities? The mages could turn to blood magic, as they had already learned when their mana was running low and there was no Lyrium around, but what would the Templars have left to do but die? 

 

Though with the amount of money those maker-damned dwarves were making, Samson would bet his right arm that they’d find a way to continue supplying both sides of the war. Lyrium was the most expensive substance in all of Thedas and could only be mined by the dwarves. They could only profit from a war like this breaking out in every country and if Samson knew anything about the Dwarves from his experience with the Dust dealers creeping along Darktown it was that gold coins meant more to them than anything. They would eagerly watch the world above ground burn if it meant they were swimming in coin. The greedy bastards. 

 

**__________**

 

The little Prince of Starkhaven made good on his threat to bring a massive army and raze Kirkwall to the ground a few months after the Chantry went to pieces. The in-fighting stopped the moment the Starkhaven warriors showed up at the gates of Kirkwall, armed to the teeth and lead by their glistening prince hellbent on the destruction of their city. After that, any apostates that might have still been in the city became nothing but an asset to the Templars who turned their Swords of Mercy to the intruders. _War is Peace_ indeed, uniting the opposing sides under the threat of the new intruders, outsiders who wanted to cause their city further pain and destruction for a crime they did not commit, a crime they had been victim to much more than the foreign prince. 

 

When the battle with Meredith had ended, the Champion of Kirkwall had taken his little group of friends and his healer-turned-terrorist lover and left the city to the damage they had wrought. No one had seen or heard from any of them since they fled, but nothing anyone said to the prince made any difference. He was convinced they were harboring the criminal, as if anyone in the city would have wanted the mage who killed their Grand Cleric and all the innocents in and around the Chantry, the apostate whose actions had gotten their husbands and children in the Circle butchered beneath the madness of the Knight Commander, in their city. 

 

The Starkhaven brat marched into their city and ordered his men to overturn every stone in every house and hovel, looking for a hint of the healer to bring him to justice. Just as the mad healer hadn’t cared enough to think of for the innocent lives lost in the explosion and the annulment that followed, Prince Vael gave no thought to the innocent citizens of Kirkwall whose homes and lives he was invading and overturning. The debris of the Chantry’s destruction had killed many and made many more homeless, but the Starkhaven soldiers had little care for frightened and displaced masses of Kirkwall, ravaged by waning supplies and a near civil war. 

 

Vael had brought along with his army a number of Starkhaven Templar Knights in his attempts to hunt down the rebel mage who had caused all of this. Samson watched from the shadows as Rutherford called a meeting with them to beg for them to reason with their prince. His attempts to meet with the pompous prince himself had gone unsuccessful. Though Sebastian Vael had respected Rutherford and agreed with his ideals while they shared the city living space, now that he saw Rutherford as an obstacle to his goal of flattening Kirkwall, he was less than willing to cooperate. 

 

The Starkhaven Templars, their Knight-Captain Rylen in particular, were more sympathetic than their city’s ruler and Samson saw them on more than one occasion sliding over vials of Lyrium when they noticed the Kirkwall Templar’s dwindling supplies. Templars, even across national borders, were bound by the Order more than the rulers of their cities or countries, by the Lyrium song tugging at their bones. It was clear that many of them disagreed with the Prince’s decisions, He had been away from the throne and even the city of Starkhaven for so long that they seemed reluctant to fight for him with anything more than a flat sense of duty. They were kinder than Samson would have been if their places were reversed, but kindness and a few vials weren’t enough to keep the city afloat. 

 

It became obvious as the Starkhaven armies swarmed the city that there was no resistance they could offer and no shelter they could have possibly given the Darktown Healer who had killed The Most Holy. The resolve of the Starkhaven Templars had broken shortly after reaching the city and finding their brothers and sisters in arms in such a state, and dissent in their ranks only added to the bastard Prince’s fervor and determination to break them. It wasn’t just the Darktown healer he was after, the Starkhaven brat wanted to see the city the Champion had loved ripped asunder, for the Hawke to know the price of his love and his leniency and that it would be paid in blood regardless of whose blood it was. 

 

The Captain of the City Guard and the Champion of Kirkwall’s friend, a ginger-haired woman Samson had mostly avoided during his days, took up the sword to defend the city more vigorously than even some of the Templars, bringing with her all the men of the City Guard to build barricades and pass out weapons from the store holds to the citizens strong and skilled enough to hold a sword and shield. They were weakened by lack of supplies with the bastard Prince blocking their flow of food and goods by way of the Waking Sea, but they were stronger than the city’s Templars, who were steadying losing their focus and their grips on their swords as the Lyrium slipped from their bodies like water through cupped fingers and not enough to replenish it. 

 

Under the command of the Guard Captain and with the strength of the armored civilians as well as the growing dissent amongst the Starkhaven Templars who had both lost the love for their leader’s contempt and knew they were needed elsewhere by the Order to fight the quell the rising mage rebellion sweeping across Thedas while they were holed up fighting a few rebel apostates and a city of half-starved and Lyrium-sick civilians and Templar brothers, the people of Kirkwall managed to push the Starkhaven forces outside the city and behind their barricades. The bastards would set up a siege no doubt, not that much in the way of supplies was making it through the battle as it was, but at least they were no longer within a swords reach. 

 

She was a good leader, the ginger-haired guard captain, and Samson felt a rush of wistfulness for his short stay in the city guard. Guard Captain Ewald and Jeven, the snake who had come after him, had both paled in comparison to the Ferelden warrior woman. Samson remembered her as being less than fond of the mages her bird-monikered friend had so enjoyed helping on the rare occasions and he and the Champion had crossed paths during their years, something about a dead Templar husband though he couldn’t remember any Templars in Kirkwall ever being allowed to marry anyone but the sick-sweet Lyrium in their cups. But though she had never been a friend to the mages of Kirkwall, the Guard Captain protected them with as much vigor as she protected the non-magic citizens of the city, as she tried to protect the swiftly weakening Templars who were meant to be the protectors. 

 

**__________**

 

It shouldn’t have filled him with sick pleasure to see Knight-Captain Rutherford stumble when their Lyrium stores ran dry. He knew exactly what that first pain felt like, experienced it every time he had managed to acquire a somewhat steady supply of the Dust before it was taken away and he had to start all over again. It started in the hands, fingers frozen no matter the layers of cloth or leather you gloved them in or how close you stood to the fire, then moved to the head until every hair on your scalp felt like it weighed a metric ton. Then the ache would start inside your bones, in your marrow, and spread out like jagged pieces through your skin until you were ready to scream from it, ready to rip out your flesh if someone would only give you a drop. 

 

Rutherford had ensured that Samson had to endure that pain for seven years on the streets of Lowtown. It was vindicating to see him begin to suffer it as well. If only the Ferelden brat wasn’t trying to be noble about it, waving off the Lyrium offers from the Starkhaven Templars to ensure his men got it first. It didn’t stop Samson was snagging a vial himself and look Rutherford in the eye as he drained it. Served the bastard right for everything he had helped Meredith put Samson through. For everything he had done to the mages. If the Knight-Captain wanted his atonement to be his own madness and death from withdrawal, it wasn’t Samson’s business. 

 

And then the Seekers of Truth marched in, a druffalo shit of an organization if ever Samson had seen one; they were supposed to be in charge of watching the Templars to make sure they didn’t abuse the power they accused the mages of abusing. Samson had been a Templar for over twenty years and on the streets for seven and he’d never once seen hide nor hair of their flaming eye symbol. No one had kept the Gallows in check and maybe if they had, if the high and mighty Seekers had bothered to do their jobs, none of what occurred in Kirkwall would have happened at all. 

 

Rutherford kept meeting with one of them, a woman with a severe face but softer eyes who had taken a keen interest in the Knight-Captain. He refused to tell any of them what was going on and why they wanted to talk to him, but they generally assumed it was about the rumors that had come pouring in of other another mage rebellion, a massive one, in the White Spire in Val Royeaux. The White Spire was the center of Templar Power, the stronghold of the Knight-Vigilant who commanded all of the Order from within. For the seat of Templar power to fall to the mage rebellion was earth-shattering even for a world-weary former Templar like Samson. 

 

The Grand Enchanter was using the abuse at Kirkwall and the invocation of the Right of Annulment in the Kirkwall Gallows as well as the murders in the White Spire to call for the rebellion to spread to every Circle of Magi - for the the complete separation of the Circles from the Chantry - at the cost of blood if they must and so the rebellion that had started with one mage, one little Darktown healer destroying the Chantry had blossomed into a full-scale war and every day they were receiving requests -orders- from other Templar Orders to abandon Kirkwall and join the fight.

 

What else could the Seekers of Truth possibly be doing in Kirkwall when such a thing was spreading across the land? Rutherford would come back, exhausted and spent from his long talks with the Seeker, look in on his Templars, and them collapse into the nearest cot. His secrecy caused whispers amongst the ranks, hackles already on the rise with the lack of Lyrium grating their bones and the trust failing between the men and their leader. And Rutherford it seemed hadn’t even noticed the disconnect. 

 

Samson watched the Knight-Captain go between his cot and the Viscount’s Keep where the Seekers had taken up residence and established base, watched the floundering Templar soldiers going unnoticed by their would-be leader and felt the old anger building up. The Templar’s _needed_ someone now to direct them, to show them where t go and what to do. To hold them together. He found himself trying to look out for them where Rutherford wouldn’t. He had more knowledge of the streets anyway, more experience with scavenging for extra food and for Dust. He wasn’t their leader, he wasn’t a leader at all but he could offer a hand to the men and women who had been as mistreated as he had bee, used and abandoned by their Chantry. 

 

And then the Seekers left and Rutherford followed them like the feeble-minded mabari pup he was, pathetic puppy dog tail wagging low, chasing after the strongest source of power in the area like he had when he first arrived in Kirkwall. The boy had latched onto Meredith and the strength of her hate when he came nightmare-ridden and shaking to the gates of the Gallows and he had followed that Maker-damned Seeker with her strut and her sneer right out the doors of the city and never looked back.

 

The Ferelden bastard didn’t even say a word of goodbyes, refused to answer the confused cries of the Templars, _his_ _Templars_ , watching him hopelessly as he marched away from his duties, from his city, from _them._ Like they weren’t worth his time once he had found someone better and stronger to follow, a great cause than caring for their city in the aftermath of the war he helped begin. The gates closed behind the foreign blond bastard and a wave of panic rippled through the watching crowd. Samson’s lip curled in contempt and in disgust, biting back the flash of hurt and worry that pooled low in his stomach, the thought echoing in every Templar in the streets, of _what now?_

 

Wystan stood at Samson’s side watching their leader go with helpless dark eyes and he found himself clapping the kid’s arm gently, winding an arm around his trembling shoulders. “I’ll look after you, boy, don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.” Though they both likely knew the promise to be written on thin paper easy to rip; there were no promises that could be kept in Kirkwall, not without Lyrium, without a Chantry to guide them, without the Maker. 

 

And now without their Knight-Captain. The Templars were floundering, drowning in the sea into which the Chantry had thrown them, and though Samson had never been anything resembling a rope to those overboard, he knew that if he didn’t look after Wystan and the others, they would sink beneath the surface. Samson had long since been jaded with the Order and the way it was run, but the individual Templars were still as close to family as he’d had since leaving his little village behind. He wasn’t a savior, he had never been the sort, but maybe he could be a mooring to hold at least one of them in place, to keep just one Templar afloat in the ever deepening and darkening waters.

 

They set first about helping the city itself, knowing they were at least partially responsible, almost entirely so, for the state of it. Debris needed to be cleared from the streets, lying their months since the Chantry’d destruction. The City Guard helped with that, still more healthy and whole than the Order, dragging thick slabs of concrete, heavy wooden beams, to pile at the gates and the docks to reinforce the barricades they had built there. The Templars set up shelters for those whose homes had been crushed and then raided, and finally Samson had a safer place for Maddox to sleep, not slipping between dank cellars in Darktown but a warm and dry room with a cot and a somewhat steady flow of food that the captain of the city guard had managed to arrange to slip through the cracks in the Starkhaven army’s attempted siege. If anyone, mage, Templar, or civilian, noticed the lone Tranquil sitting quietly in the corner, they said and did nothing about it. 

 

**__________**

 

The Lyrium ran completely dry not long after Rutherford left with the Seeker and the Starkhaven Templars withdrew to fight the mages elsewhere where the world was catching fire as the flames of the mage rebellion and the Templar’s response spread across the land and the importance of the one apostate who set the spark paled in comparison with the inferno that had begun. They took with them the last of their supplies. The beginning edge of withdrawal was tugging at Samson’s finger bones and he found himself awake long after Maddox had dropped off to sleep in the shelter. 

 

They were lost, the Templars. Leaderless. The Chantry had abandoned them. It was clear now how little they meant to the Divine. Rutherford had abandoned them too, to run off on important business with the Seeker who had ignored the rest of the soldiers to talk to the Knight-Captain. There was nothing outside the city walls but more war and death.

 

Knowing he would get no sleep with the itch in his veins and anger in his heart, Samson checked that Maddox was still dozing lightly on the cot next to him, drew the blanket higher over the mage’ shoulder despite the warmer weather, and set off with his last few coppers for The Hanged Man. He needed a damned drink. 

 

The tavern was mostly empty -had been since all the fighting started, but Corff never really closed. He eyed Samson warily when he stepped through the door; Templars were only good for business when they were drinking and not causing trouble hunting down mages. Kirkwall had been less and less friendly to her Templars the longer their war went on. And in the past Corff had once or twice had to kick Samson out when he had no money for drink and was trying to spend a night in the relative warmth and dryness of the bar. It smelled like stale ale and vomit, the sweat of the unsavory types who could afford rooms, but it was always better than a night on the street. But he had coin now, if only enough for a drink or two, and Corff wasn’t in a position to turn down customers if the lack of gentle bar chatter was any indication. 

 

Halfway through his second ale, Samson realized someone was watching him and cursed his thirst-dampened senses for failing to notice earlier to dwarf sitting several seats down. He had eyes unlike any Samson had ever seen, though he tended to avoid any dwarf the wasn’t selling him Dust, strange and milky, blank and unfocussed almost almost like a retired Templar whose brain had been eaten away years before by the Lyrium. He received no response when he raised his mug to the stranger and scoffed to himself, going back to his cup.

 

But then the dwarf moved closer, appearing at his side with a swiftness that startled him, and mumbled in his ear that he was being asked for by name in one of the rooms upstairs. There was just enough ale in his system that Samson was more curious than wary and he followed the strange-eyed dwarf into one of the dark rooms. 

 

The stranger inside was threatening enough in looks to engage Samson’s sluggish Templar instincts and he found himself with sword in hand, muscles tense and eyes wary. He wasn’t human, to tall, too malformed, to be a man, but without the sick sense that blood magic gave off - not an abomination or risen corpse either though he was certainly skeletal enough to be one. He wasn’t afraid in the least of Samson’s sword or stance, waiting patiently until he released his grip to begin speaking. 

 

“This place is foreign to me. Tell me, what is a Templar?”

 

What was a Templar? There was no answer for that, not anymore. Everything they had once been was gone. So many young hopefuls joined the Order because they wanted to protect mages, kids who had watched magical siblings get carted off and held onto the hope they would get to follow, to wield the sunburst shield to protect them. But they were nothing more than glorified prison guards, pushing magelings into dark corners for darker deeds, putting them to the sword for nothing more than rumors. Or worse, like Maddox with their souls burned away with the Lyrium brand. Meredith had violated Chantry law to destroy Maddox’s mind and Grand Cleric Elthina had acted like she had spilled her milk at supper.

 

Templars had once been called the soldiers of the Chantry. They fought wars every day that armies were afraid to tend to, the abominations, demons, and blood mages that mages of the lands could become -and often did become when the Templars cornered and abused them. Rutherford had survived a demon uprising in Ferelden’s Kinloch Hold and the nightmares he had suffered for years after were the only thanks he received from the Chantry for his efforts. They were given Lyrium to leash them to the Chantry and to get their screams in the night. 

 

Could they be Knights of the Maker if the Maker had abandoned them? A just Maker, a loving Maker would not have allowed for the suffering of his children. Samson had long stopped praying since his first few months on the streets of Kirkwall when the thirst had him by the throat and he had sobbed into the silence of the night for mercy. He had never been granted it. If there was a Maker at all he was a cruel and cold bastard like the rest of them. 

 

Anger was easier than pain. It rose in Samson like a wave and he found himself allowing it to carry him further, snarling. “The Order deserves better. We trust them: we deserve better than being used until our minds are washed away. They treat us like animals. Their own Templars!” It wasn’t _fair_ what the Chantry had been allowed to get away with. Collar its soldiers and leash them tight, burn away the minds of both Templar and mage until neither could be of any use, then throw them out in the cold. It was _wrong_ and no one was making them pay for it. 

 

The stranger held up a Lyrium vial, glowing red in the darkness of the room. Its song filled the space, deeper than the blue’s sweet melody. It touched Samson in his marrow even from across the room and drew him closer. He remembered Meredith’s sword singing the same dark tune in the Gallows courtyard. And he remembered the way he body had gleamed and glowed from the inside out, the Lyrium crystalizing in her flesh until she had been frozen there. Her body was still there, a statue of dangerous music to remind them all of her madness. No one had thus far been willing to go near enough to try and move it. The bitch didn’t deserve a proper burial anyway. But Samson remembered the _power_ the red Lyrium had given her: enough that she had held her own against the Champion of Kirkwall, his companions, and most of the remaining Order. It hadn’t been them to take her down, it had been the Lyrium itself to end the battle.

 

Power like that… it might be worth the simple price of his life. 

 

The stranger asked Samson what he would be willing to pay if he could tear out the Chantry by its roots, start the Order over with the respect it should have had to begin with and he nearly laughed. What wouldn’t he give to save his brothers and sisters in arms? To save the little magelings who died under the Chantry’s fist? To save _Maddox?_

 

_“_ If it gave one Templar a better end than mine,” he found himself saying, and added silently to himself, _if it saved mages like Maddox from the fucking Lyrium brand, from stepping off the circle tower to their deaths, from turning to blood magic in fear for their lives,_ “I’d pour out my own blood for it.” But he was burned out and washed up. He would be no help to the stranger, and he told the creature so. Samson knew he was a shell of the man he had once been, used and dried up by the Lyrium and desperate thirst for it. He had enough in him to save Maddox and keep him safe. There was nothing more. It was all just words and the dry husk of anger.

 

“I think not,” the stranger replied extended his hand to Samson, vial of Lyrium gleaming, singing. Samson looked the creature in the eyes, saw the deep wisdom and power there, and took the vial from him. And it was as easy, as dangerous, as accepting Maddox’s little paper birds.

 

**__________**

 

“Maddox, do you trust me?”

 

Maybe it was unfair to ask that of someone who could not feel passion and indeed any emotions at all. Was trust a feeling? Something Maddox had been cut off from when the Knight-Commander had seared the Lyrium brand into his flesh? Maddox stayed with him after the destruction of the Chantry and the Gallows, certainly not because washed up and burned out Samson could keep him safe. He couldn’t for the life of him understand _why_ but also couldn’t bring himself to ask, afraid of the response he might receive. 

 

Under the blank Tranquil gaze, Maddox’s once bright and expressive brown eyes gone soft and cold and impassive, and Samson nearly flinched, but Maddox seemed to merely be considering the question, giving it as deep a thought as he was able before carefully forming his response. 

 

“You have always looked out for me,” he began, and Samson began pacing to quell his nerves. “You were punished for helping me in the Gallows and despite that you came to save me from the Right of Annulment. I am have no usefulness to offer you, there was no logic in putting yourself at risk to do so, but you saved me anyway. You return to the Gallows because I requested it. You never expected or demanded recompense for any of your actions. Is that not the basis of a trustworthy person?”

 

Samson could not remember the last time someone said something kind about him. Had it been Thrask? Years ago before he had left the Order? Maddox himself one day in his smithing tent in the Gallows Courtyard? Samson was embarrassed to find the spark of heat and damp in his eyes at the words -not even overly kind but honest in the way only a Tranquil could be. They didn’t embellish, they didn’t lie to appease the feelings of others. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Maddox’s shoulders, pulling the boy against his chest and resting his chin on his shaved head. He murmured his thanks with the press of dry kisses to the boy’s scalp, finding himself suddenly breathless with it. 

 

“Something has changed,” Maddox murmured, voice muffled where he was pressed against Samson’s chest. “You have made a decision.”

 

Samson did not answer him, heart racing. He simply tightened his grip on his friend in response, hand cupping then back of his shorn head. Maddox allowed himself to be held. If he knew the comfort it gave Samson to have his friend in his arms, he made no comment, sitting still and peaceful under Samson’s trembling hands and accepting therepeated rough press of the Templar’s chapped lips to the top of his head.

 

“I will follow you, Samson. Wherever you see fit to lead us.” 


	4. Kiss on the Forehead

The Temple of Dumat was a wonder for Templars who had rarely seen the outside of a Chantry. Instead of taking ships across the Waking Sea, their new leader, Corypheus, had ordered the Templars to march around the Planasene Forest and the Fields of Ghislain to the shrine hidden in the north of Orlais not far from Montfort. The Lyrium he offered gave them the strength to march for weeks with little rest. It was crumbling in bits, an ancient Tevinter temple that had stood for thousands of years, but the Templars cried out to find it ready for them - beds for the first time since before the had left their Chantries to join the war efforts, and longer for those who had come with Samson from Kirkwall, and proper food waiting to be eaten. 

 

Corypheus met with Samson late into the night when most of the Templars had taken advantage of the beds and crashed into sleep. He surveyed his new army, and though Samson could not read the ancient magister’s face, he seemed content at least with the masses his general had collected and brought to heel. 

 

“They are strong,” Samson promised as he and the darkspawn creature walked the perimeter of the shrine. “They will take to the Red Lyrium well. We are eager to fight at your side and burn this Chantry to the ground.” 

 

And they were. The Templars under Samson’s command, the men and women of all ages and years of experience in the Order who had answered his call, they were all of them jaded by the abuses they had witnesses. While most did not care for the mages as he did, he knew, all of them had a brother in arms, a mentor, and oftentimes even themselves, that they had lost to the Lyrium noose the Chantry had slipped around their necks without their permission. 

 

They had all been warned of Knight-Commander Meredith’s end, her glowing red statue still frozen and contorted in the Gallows Courtyard. The Red Lyrium would do that to them and they had every chance to walk away before they started, even after they started if they truly wanted to. Samson would put no leash on his Templars, no noose around their necks. The Red Lyrium, their new God, represented the choice that had been taken from them the day the reverend mother tilted the chalice of sweet Blue down their throats. 

 

The world was in need of a new God. Though Samson had grown to hate the Maker for His everlasting silence in his time of need, for turning his back on his children now matter how they begged and prayed, he had always _believed_ in him. At first he had thought himself unworthy of the Maker’s praise and his help but as time went on and he witnessed the horrors of the world, Samson had decided the Maker to be a cruel and uncaring creator who did not deserve their prayers and obedience. 

 

After meeting Corypheus, the Elder One, he often called himself, and witnessing his power -his very _existence_ if what he had told Samson about being a High Priest of Dumat, the first human to step foot inside the Golden City was true- Samson was not so sure the Maker was the one deserving of their prayers. The gifts Corypheus wielded, his magic, his will, spoke of nothing but Godhood. And he _listened_ when Samson spoke. He allowed Samson to gather his Templars, even the youngest like Wystan barely into adulthood and still new to the Sunburst Shield, and the oldest like Rivierre who had retired from the Order before the Kirkwall Chantry was destroyed; he gave them all the power they would need in the little red vials. He gave them a _home_ in the Shrine of Dumat, a place they could come back to, a place they could find respite. 

 

Not every Templar had joined their cause of course. Their purpose was to bring the Red Storm and many of the Order had preferred to continue the war against the mages. It was a tiring thing, the war, as a reinstated Templar General who had befriended so many mages in his years, who kept his Tranquil friend Maddox as close to his side as he could safely do, it hurt to watch both sides falling to the war efforts. He had thought, with Corypheus’ mage abilities, that the ancient magister would order them to help the mages win the battle with their Red Lyrium-strength but he seemed content to watch the tear across Thedas grow. And when the conclave was called, the peace talks that came three years too late under Divine Justinia V’s pathetic and cowardly rule, Corypheus sent Samson and his Templars away and attended the meeting himself. 

 

They heard later the explosion at the Conclave that rocked all of Thedas and ripped a hole in the sky. The death of the Divine. The Templars watched from far across the land the massive stretch of eerie green that cut against the night stars. They knew their God was responsible and some even looked shaken; years of Chantry indoctrination was not undone with a few vials of Red Lyrium and the Divine had been their religious mother for decades. Samson gave them all a few days to mourn, walking between the ranks and clapping shoulders, ruffling hair as he went. 

 

The Elder One returned angry. He had lost something. The Qunari they had pulled from the rubble of the Temple of Sacred Ashes, the one they were now calling The Herald of Andraste, had stolen something from Him and the Black City, the Throne of the Gods, could not be secured without it.

 

“We will wait until they are confident that they have won,” he told Samson, ignoring the questioning looks from the Red Templars about the massive glowing hole in the sky. “They have taken refuge in a tiny Ferelden hovel called Haven. They will attack the Breach. They will celebrate. And when they are drunk on their ale and their ignorance, you will take our Templars and you will smite them upon the mountainside.”

 

Corypheus offered no further explanation of what had been stolen and why it was important, or the green glow spewing demons upon the world, The Breach he had called it. It was no matter. The Templars had been given far fewer commands and explanations under the boots of the Chantry, carried out death sentences and wielded the Lyrium brand with merely a command from their Order leaders and followed without a second thought. Corypheus had given them far more in exchange than the reverend mothers and Knight-Commanders ever had and they would do his bidding. 

 

Sometimes, Samson would catch Maddox outside the smithing tent, his blank eyes on the sky. 

 

“It is the Fade,” he murmured when Samson approached. “The Fade is touching our world. That is how Corypheus will reach the Black City and take back the throne of the Gods.”

 

Maddox spoke with the calm and analytical tone Samson had slowly gotten used to, but still he found himself wishing to hear his friend speak the words as he would have before the Lyrium brand, before the Rite of Tranquility when wonder or fear would fill his voice. _Something_ beyond the blank and the monotone. 

 

Wrapping an arm around Maddox’s waist under the guise of keeping him warm in the cool Orlesian air, Samson huffed.

 

“And we will help to get him there.” 

 

**__________**

 

The Red Lyrium was like nothing Samson had ever experienced before. The heat of it blossoming in his stomach and running through his fingertips like a warm stew after having been in the cold; he’d been in the cold so long without even realizing it and the Red was welcoming him home. The strength and the power it gave him, not just physically but in his mind and his heart. Everything burned hot and then tempered, like steel, inside him. Hardened and sharp, as dangerous as a newly forged blade in the hands of a master smith. 

 

And what was more, there was none of the cloudy peace that the Blue Lyrium had blanketed them in. The Chantry had plied them with the Blue so they wouldn’t have nightmares, so they wouldn’t realize how sick their orders were and fight back. It kept them blanketed in a soothing fog of gentle power and forgetfulness. It kept them dependent so the nightmares, the awareness, would fade. It lulled the Templars into compliance, into sleep from reality and masked it with the paltry power it offered to help them put the mages into their iron cages and keep them down. 

 

When Samson drank the Red Lyrium it brought him _clarity_. There were none of the soft edges the Blue gave to the world; everything was sharp and clear. Hard. He could look at his surroundings with a logic the Blue had denied him. Though his nerves were settled with the Red Lyrium it wasn’t with the foggy blanket of inebriation, a rustling calm that swept over him like a silence. He was able to focus on his men and what they needed, what Maddox needed and Corypheus to take the world with the red storm. To succeed. 

 

The Blue had slipped through his system so quickly that he had been desperate for more. He never thought of dosages just that he needed _more_ \- and indeed the Chantry hadn’t either, not in exact measures. When the Templars became less effective they increased the daily ration until they were useful again, never mind that they were burning away the Templars’, _their soldiers’_ minds until it became inconvenient and they were cut off, labelled erratic and severely addicted like that hadn’t been the Chantry’s plan all along.

 

There was no desperate need with the Red. It stayed in the Templar’s bodies longer, constantly providing the power, the strength both physical and mental, and when it finally faded it did so without the sudden desperate ache for more. It _hurt_ if they went too long without it, coming back from a raid a day or two late with their stores run dry, but Lyrium always hurt. The pain went deeper than the Blue, not just a jagged feeling in their bones but a _breaking_ , a soul-deep ache that made them scream. But it was worth it not to lose their minds as quickly, not to be crying for more only weeks after their first taste. 

 

And in that clarity Samson was able to look at the dosages he was giving himself, giving his men, and ration it properly. He didn’t need to flood them with Lyrium and they didn’t ask for it. He knew, quickly, what too much, a dose to high, would look like: it _burned_ in them too-hot skin red and blistering under the strength and heat of it. It was tricky at first to get the rations just right where his Templars were strong and glowing but not burning. He wanted to heat them, power them, not leave his men screaming and in ashes. 

 

Aleah, a seasoned Templar who had joined the Order a year or two after Samson himself, could take two full vials before the heat became too much. Wystan, who had so recently joined the Order and had almost no resistance to the Lyrium built up at all in his system, could only take a third of a vial before he would shake and sweat with it. It wasn’t unusual to have such a dynamic difference in his men; Wystan was the youngest in their ranks even as more Templars were pouring in to join their forces. Samson carefully measured out the dosages for each and every one of his men. 

 

Samson began to wonder about his own tendency for addiction. They Lyrium -both Red and Blue- got them all. No Templar was exempt from being an addict, but the levels certainly varied. He had seen Templars drink their fill for fifty years before it destroyed their minds while others, like himself, made it barely two decades before the Thirst got them thrown into the dirt and the chokedamp. With the Blue he had been constantly on edge, waiting for his morning rations to smooth out the jagged bones in his flesh, sometimes spending days with the pain of it grounding him to his bed.

 

Now that he could see what he needed, the logic of it all, Samson began to wonder if it wasn’t a _weakness_ in him that made him so susceptible to the Lyrium’s song, but a _resistance_. A strength to its effects that made him desperate for more. Even with the Red, it gave him strength, immeasurable strength, and it soothed his nerves and cleared his mind as it did for his Red Templars, but it didn’t take him the way it did them. The Red brought about sudden irrational anger in some of his men after a few weeks, fits of violence that he had to temper with sparring sessions and training but Samson, though he had always been quick to anger, wet fury hot in his chest, felt nothing but the calm the Red brought. 

 

The entire line of thought, weakness versus resistance, was a balm to soothe his ego, Samson knew. He wanted to think of himself as stronger, to have a reason beyond the Lyrium’s song that was so much easier for others to block out. As much as he had blamed Knight-Commander Meredith and the Chantry, and rightfully so, for his addiction, the fact remained that it took to him quicker than any of the other Templar’s he’d ever met. But even with the Red’s power in his veins, Samson was a coward, desperate for a salve to alleviate his blistered pride.

 

**__________**   


Samson made sure that every Templar to join his side knew the risks of taking the Red Lyrium. No one had warned them of the addictive quality of the Blue, no one had _warned_ them it would burn their minds away and leave them useless and feeble until Death took them. Those who had been at the Kirkwall Gallows had witnessed what would be their end with Meredith. Her gleaming solid form, a Lyrium statue, had often haunted their dreams in the months following the destruction of the Chantry and the Right of Annulment. The Templars joining from other countries and cities, other Chantries, were informed long before they were given their first vial and again after. Samson would not lie to his men. He would not become another Meredith Stannard, using and abusing his men for their power.

 

In the months that followed the explosion at the Conclave, the months of taking the Red Lyrium, training under its heat and power, it became clear that everything they had expected to risk, what they had expected to exchange for their power, was nowhere near what the Red Lyrium would take from them. What it would demand in return. 

 

It started with a scream. It was a sound like Samson had never heard before, horror-filled and desperate, and so chilling that it gave Samson shivers despite the heat of his tent, the heat of the Lyrium in his blood, and he found himself scrambling from his cot a rush in the direction of the awful sound. 

 

One of his Templars, Carroll, who had come to him Lyrium-addled and shaking from Kinloch Hold in Ferelden, was on the ground, clutching at his shoulder. A crowd of Templars had gathered around him in a circle, horror and disbelief clear on their faces and Samson pushed through to reach the younger man. He writhed, curled in on himself and wailing even as Samson tried to stretch out a hand to him, straighten him out and see what was the cause of his pain. Carroll had been taking a higher level of the Red Lyrium than many in their ranks to ease the ache of the Blue that had so taken him. 

 

When Carroll finally uncurled enough to allow his general to examine him, Samson had to fight back the flinch that rocked him: sprouting from Carroll’s shoulder was a thick Lyrium crystal, the size and width of Samson’s fist. It was set deep, as if rooted in the bone, as if he were… _growing_ it within his skin. Everything in Samson wanted to reel back but he steeled his face like a good general and forced Carroll to his feet. They had alchemists in their ranks, they would find a healer if they needed to. He would take care of his men. 

 

While Carroll lay moaning on a cot, the spread of the Lyrium began to catch in other Templars in their Order. Sprouting columns of crystals from their flesh, fingers fusing red and gleaming, tears in the skin of their faces to reveal glowing Lyrium in their jawbones and teeth. They kidnapped apostate healers from nearby Orlesian villages, put their alchemists to work without rest and still there was no cure in sight. More clusters scattered across Carroll’s shoulders and back, winding around his chest like a vine. 

 

It had started with a faint red glow to their eyes, more obvious when they stood in great numbers, softly glimmering carmine standing out from their faces. It had spread to the nails of their hands, a weak tint of the hands gripping their swords or cast of their teeth. It was what they had expected, knowing the Lyrium would eventually solidify their insides as it had done to the Kirkwall Knight-Commander until they too became Lyrium statues. It would kill them and the Red Templars were more than willing to give their lives to the cause, to Samson and to Corypheus and everything he stood for. This… this was not what they had bargained for.

 

The screaming became a nightly occurrence but it didn’t stop Samson from leaping from his tent -he didn’t bother to sleep much anymore, not when his men couldn’t, and spent little time in his cot- and every night there was another Templar falling to the Red Lyrium disease sweeping through his ranks. On a particularly gruesome evening Samson ran toward the pained cries to find several Templars holding back a wailing Rathka, a Templar he had trained with in the Gallows some twenty years before. The Lyrium crystals had coated her arm, fingers fused and hand sharpened into a point. Her entire sword arm from fingertip to the crease of her elbow had become a crystal. She had taken the sword in her non dominant arm and hacked away at the limb until it disconnected her flesh and she lay, bleeding sluggishly and screaming, in the frightened grip of her brothers in arms. Beneath the blood, the bone of her stump of her an arm glowed red. 

 

Samson visited Carroll and the other Templars showing signs of the Lyrium infection, Maes, Rathka, Onnus, Maeven and countless others, every day. They set up a tent to keep them away from the uninfected Templars who vacillated between fluttering nervously outside the tent and avoiding it entirely. Samson knew all of their names, every man under his command, every drop in the red storm. Some turned away when he approached their cots, rolled onto their side where the Lyrium growths allowed and faced the wall of the tent. He tried not to let the sting of their hurt and betrayal drag him down. He would sit at their sides and talk to them for hours if it got them to roll back over and look him in the eye. Others would reach for him, with flesh or Lyrium hands and he would not flinch or withdraw, instead reaching out and taking hold. If this was the risk, then it was his to share. 

 

They weren’t dying. The Lyrium grew, slowly, over their bodies and in their flesh, but his Templars weren’t _dying_. The Lyrium growths gave them more power and less fear. Often a healer would come running over, magic in their fingertips to douse a fire that had arisen from the strength of the Lyrium coursing through their blood and bone. 

 

Samson had been writing desperate letters to Corypheus, who was gathering more forces in Tevinter, but their New God was not a creature to answer a summons from a simple human and it was long after the effects of the Red Lyrium had begun that he saw fit to return to the Shrine of Dumat. He did not seem concerned or surprised by the state in which he found his Templar army. 

 

“It will make them invincible.” He stated simply when Samson pressed him as far as he dare. “You have seen their power grow, have you not? Burning fire and immeasurable strength. That is the power of the Red Lyrium.” The God motioned to his own grotesquely malformed and decayed body, riddled as it was with the thick crystals. “They will not be easily defeated.” The creature laughed crudely, the sound harsh in the stillness of the Orlesian forest, “why do you think I have named you my Red Templars? My Red General? This is your fate. This is the price for your power.” 

 

After Corypheus left the camp again, telling them the time was drawing nearer for the attack on Haven and the Herald of Andraste’s sad little bunch of rebels, Samson met with the rest of his Templars to tell them their fate. The spread of the Lyrium would get worse, would possibly take over their entire bodies and make them something monstrous. There would be no rhyme or reason to how and who it affected but they were all of them -himself as well- at risk. It wasn’t what they had agreed to give up in exchange for their power; it was one thing to lay down your life for a cause, it was something else entirely to give up your humanity for a little extra power. 

 

They had to be monstrous, he told them, and would tell them again, as the war waged on. They were fighting the Chantry, a beast that had sunk its claws into Thedas for so long it would take the ruthlessness of a monster to rip it out and burnt its roots. Wasn’t that worth it, he would ask, even the steep price of their bodies and minds? The right for Templars everywhere to be their own, free from the Chantry’s oppressive leashes and mind-rotting Lyrium? They were the Red Storm and with their own blood they would wash away all the evil that the Chantry had put into the word. The Red Sea, the Red Storm, would rise. 

 

If anyone had doubts after Samson’s speech they did not voice them and he was met instead with a round of applause. Templars, and indeed people in general, Samson had found, would do anything if it let them believe their pain had a purpose. That was Samson’s job: feed the Templars Hope and keep them from Despair. 

 

**__________**

 

 

The swiftness of Wystan’s descent into Lyrium madness took them all by surprise. Samson knew it was coming on the march back from the Orlesian forests. They boy could hardly breathe and he was shivering despite the heat of the fire, of the blanket around him. But he hadn’t wanted to think about it, even with the Red Lyrium to soothe his nerves and allow him to meet with his behemoth leaders in the camp off-set from the Shrine of Dumat. 

 

Wystan was a special case where Samson was concerned. He’d been just a kid when Samson had met him, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they came. He and Thrask had been the ones to show up at Wystan’s home in a village just outside Kirkwall to take his older sister to the Circle. The girl hadn’t lasted, too soft-hearted and sweet for the horrors of the Chantry’s rules, and only a few years later her little brother had appeared in the Chantry doorway, eager to help little magelings as he and Thrask had his sister. They hadn’t told him her fate and when he asked after her, Thrask reminded the boy that mages were often traded between Circles. Wystan been fascinated with Samson’s determination to help the mages; he wasn’t afraid of them in the least and Samson had a sneaking suspicion that he had looked after Maddox and all the mages Samson had helped after his expulsion. 

 

The look on the boy’s face when the Right of Annulment had begun, the terror at having to cut down the mages he had lived and grown with most of his life, the death of the Grand Cleric Elthina who had held his hands in prayer and given him his morning rations of Lyrium… Such an innocence and naivety that it was a wonder he hadn’t gone the way of his sister under Meredith’s thumbscrews. 

 

Of all the Templars in Samson’s army, Wystan was the one he hoped could be spared the monstrosities of what the Red Lyrium would do to them. He took so little of the Lyrium, tolerated only a swallow or so, that Samson thought he might be safe. But no one had taken it that quickly, fine a half mouthful and raging the next. He wondered if he done the right thing, letting the boy live. He should have cut his throat and spared him, spared _himself_ , the horrors of watching the boy become a monster. But he was weak and he could not bring himself to draw his sword across the boy’s pale throat. Wystan had lay, sobbing and spluttering frightened apologies, beneath him and he had only been able to reach down and pull him up. 

 

Later he would find refuge in Maddox’s tent, the scent of the Lyrium permeating the air and the rhythmic sounds of his hammer hitting steel. 

 

“Am I like her, Maddox?” He asked, soft enough that he wasn’t sure the Tranquil heard him over the crackling of the forge’s fire, the clang of his hammer until the sound stopped and he felt the presence of his friend at his side. “Leading my men blindly into corruption?” 

 

Samson’s greatest fear since taking the mantle of the Red General and leading the lost and floundering Templars was to end up like Meredith Stannard. _Using_ his men -and his mages- like commodities until they were burned up and useless and throwing him out. Everything they were trading for their goal, for Corypheus. It was worth it, wasn’t it? Wystan -and many of the others who felt the first stirrings of the Red taking over their bodies as it had the boy that night- were afraid to tell him when it started; they didn’t want to disappoint him. He commanded his men, _loved_ them, but he didn’t know if that was enough to shield himself from the shadow of Meredith. 

 

The Tranquil weren’t known for their skills in comforting but Maddox lay a hand on Samson’s shoulder and the general tried not to lean into it like a kitten being stroked. 

 

“Everyone is aware of the risks involved, Samson,” he spoke steadily, “you have not hidden that from them. You have not excluded yourself from the Lyrium’s fire; you share the same Fate.” 

 

And at that Samson snorted hard enough to give Maddox pause because he _didn’t_ did he? He’d been taking as much of the Red Lyrium for as long the soldiers who had been with him from the beginning. Yet most of them who were taking full doses were monsters or well on their way and there was not a crystal in sight on his own skin. The resistance, the weakness, whatever it was that saved him from the Lyrium infections set him apart from his men and the guilt settled as deep in his stomach, in his bones, as the Lyrium crystals did the bones of his Templars. 

 

“You care. Knight-Commander Meredith did not. Not for the Templars and certainly not for the mages. That makes all the difference, Samson.” 

 

Closing his eyes, Samson leaned forward, rubbing his temples and sighing heavily and Maddox’s hand tightened on his shoulder for just a moment. He found himself reaching up, and laying his hand atop the Tranquil’s, warm through the fabric of his tunic and the mage let him hold on as long as he needed, to take comfort where it was offered in silence. 

 

“You always know just what to say.” He was joking, mostly, though it had brought him comfort to hear. Maddox gave a soft hum in response regardless.

 

“You are sometimes emotional. Irrational. You need logic to find balance. I can offer that. It is reasonable for you to find comfort in such words. You are my friend, Samson. It does not make my words less true.” 

 

If it had been anyone else calling him emotional and irrational Samson wouldn’t have laughed low and rough and nodded, cupping their elbow in affection and agreement. But it wasn’t anyone else, it was Maddox. Samson had already established that Maddox was, always, his greatest weakness. And besides, Tranquil couldn’t lie; there was no advantage to it or fear to cause it. Maddox had no need to assuage his guilt or appease his ego. 

 

Maddox told Samson to get sleep -another thing he wouldn’t have tolerated from anyone else- and he went only after the Tranquil promised to finish up his smithing work shortly before returning to his own cot. If he didn’t sleep enough with the Lyrium giving him strength enough to stay awake and alert for days, then Maddox, without the Lyrium to sustain him, was getting even less, often working late into the night and rising early the next morning to complete a new project. Tranquil required little sleep with no mana reserves to recharge and no dreams to tempt them into the abyss of unconscious, but Samson had a sneaking suspicion that Maddox’s fixation on perfecting the armor Corypheus had commissioned for him was beginning to push the limits of how long even a Tranquil could go without sleep. And so he waited patiently for Maddox’s quiet promise to head to his own tent once again.

 

When he awoke the next morning to find the steel bird, just like the paper birds Maddox had once made for Mea, sitting on the table beside his cot he could have sobbed, remembering their conversation the night before, before Wystan’s attack had drawn him from Maddox’s tent. He hadn’t told the Tranquil of the visions he’d been having, the paper birds in the muck as he attacked the Orlesian chevaliers in the woods, remembering how his last bird, the one Samson had stolen from Mea bearing Maddox’s love, had been trampled beneath the Meredith’s boots when he had been thrown out of the Order so long ago. 

 

Finding some spare leather, Samson fashioned a cord and wound it carefully around the bird’s breast and under its wings, then tied it around his neck. He tucked the bird beneath his tunic where it would lie against his heart, just as the paper birds had when he had delivered them. He had wondered sometimes if anything of the boy he had loved in the Gallows had remained after Meredith had pressed the Lyrium brand into his skin. The steel bird around his neck, warm against his beating heart, told Samson there was some of that bright-eyed boy was left in there and it warmed him in ways even the Red Lyrium couldn’t. 

 

**__________**

 

Soon enough the Qunari Herald of Andraste marched on the Breach, the massive tear in the sky between their world and the Fade, and managed to stop its spread if not seal it. Their forces were greeted with celebrations and cries of triumph, sighs of relief, all across Thedas. As if it would ever be so easy. The little band following their Herald, their Maker's Light, were fools to think that slaying a few demons, recruiting the rebel mages away from their war efforts, and shoving a glowing hand into the sky would actually be the end of it all.

 

And as Corypheus had ordered, Samson took his Red Templars and waited until the celebrations were at their highest, when bows and swords and shields were forgotten for bottles of wine and ale, for food and song and dance, to make his strike. Dirty tactics perhaps, but there was nothing clean in a war. You either won or you were dead and Samson had no intention of his men being the ones whose corpses were left in the snow.

 

He stood at his God’s side on the cliff before the village’s gates, the thrum of the Red Lyrium singing in his veins, screaming in excitement at the chance to finally be _used_. This was not a few chevalier troops lost in the woods, not sparring sessions between crystal monsters to keep the unbridled rage at bay. This was the opportunity to show their God, the Elder One, all that they had achieved with the power he had given them.

 

Looking down, Samson sneered when he caught sight of the Commander at the Qunari Herald’s side. Knight-Captain Cullen Rutherford, who had abandoned his Templars in Kirkwall to their addictions and their wars to run off with the Seeker, had ended up right where Samson wanted to see him most: right in the path of his sword. A fitting end to a cowardly snake. The Red in his bones fueled Samson’s hate into a war cry and he was gleeful to see the traitorous Ferelden whelp flinch at the sound, at the mere sight of his face. He wondered if the pup recognized his sword, ripped from his old Knight-Commander’s still-frozen Lyrium statue in the Gallows Courtyard. _Certainty_ , she had called it, a sword that sang in harmony with the Red in his heart. Fitting that Meredith’s sword, reforged to sing to him and him alone, would take the dog’s head.

 

As the panicked bells rang out in the flaming village below, their victory was almost certain; an army of Red Lyrium-strengthened Templars and an ancient magister God against a couple of rebel mages, a seeker, and the false prophet Herald of Andraste. Even without the Lyrium, Samson was confident his men would have triumphed.  Haven was not a defendable village, no great walls or weapons to protect its people. There were few trebuchet on the plateau but nothing Samson and his men couldn’t handle. Trebuchet needed to be manned and Samson didn’t intend to give the citizens the chance to do so. 

 

Sending forth Knight-Captain Denam, an Orlesian Templar who had come to them early, spitting vitriol about the Templar Order, the Seekers, and the Chantry, Samson listened to the howls of terror as the Knight-Captain’s visage, a hulking mass of glowing crystal where he had taken to the Red Lyrium hard and fast, towered over the little Chantry mice and alchemists of the village. Denam, in his perfected and near-invincible form, loomed several feet taller than their best soldiers and with one swing of his mighty arm, thick and broad as a war hammer, took out an entire row of trembling soldiers, hurling even the strongest of warriors back into the snow. 

 

And others like Denam followed. All of Samson’s men raging forward on the attack. They would leave the false prophet to their God to torture for his theft of the Anchor, and Rutherford was, on Samson’s command, to be left to him and him alone, but the rest, the seeker and her friends, the remaining rebel mages, were fair game.

 

It was strange, a little, to be hunting mages when most of Samson’s life he had been trying to save them. All those years doing odd favors for their smiles and later little vials of Lyrium, being thrown out of the Order for helping Maddox. Those he had tried and failed to rescue during the Annulment of the Gallows. He and his Red Templars had avoided the mage-Templar war out of necessity to stay hidden until Corypheus was ready to reveal them but also because they, or at least a handful of them and Samson himself, were tired of the mindless slaughter of magelings and of taking orders from the Chantry that had started it all and had shed no blood to pay. All his work to keep magelings save and breathing and alive only to finally put them to sword in nothing, snow-covered village in the mountains of Ferelden where no one would look for their bodies to put the rest say prayers over their last breaths.

 

Everything had a price. They were willing to give up so much of themselves, their bodies and minds and humanity for the strength the Red Lyrium could offer them, strength enough to destroy the Chantry and fill the gaping wounds left by its roots with a softer world, a better life for the Templars who would come after them. Corypheus had a different price: everything they were and everything they had been belonged to him. He needed to take Haven, he needed to find the False Prophet and rip out his throat, rip out his Anchor and to do that, they would need to bring the mages to heel or kill them in the process. There was no question, no consideration of not following orders, but Samson still found himself hoping that none of the rebel mages there had been someone he knew at Kirkwall and helped once, no familiar faces looking horrified in the bleeding masses to fall beneath Meredith’s sword.

 

Samson had expected Rutherford to meet him on the battlefield, to waste no time in the chance to kill him once and for all. Their animosity went back ten years since before the Ferelden pup’s word had gotten him thrown out, Maddox made Tranquil, and himself a promotion from Knight-Lieutenant to Knight-Captain. Since the boy had first first come to the Gallows a jumpy thing frightened of his own shadow and seeing blood magic in every fiber of the mages’ bodies. He had long been disgusted with Samson’s affections for their mageling charges and the battle gave him the chance to carve that disgust out of Samson’s flesh and yet… Samson watched Rutherford usher others back, Chantry rats and civilians, pushing them toward the Chantry doors and fighting only those that came for him directly. 

 

They were Templars, Samson told himself, and Rutherford had always had a softer spot for Templars. He wouldn’t want to hurt them if he could help it. If Samson had brought an army of mages to fight at Corypheus’ side he doubted the old Knight-Captain would have bothered to help anyone else run, would have gone for the throat of every little mageling in his path until he got to Samson. But these were _his_ Templars, not Rutherford’s. Even if the Knight-Captain had stretched out the hand of Mercy they would have hacked it from his body before leaving him to Samson to finish off.

 

Hearing a loud cry, the screaming screech of rock on rock, Samson let himself be distracted, head turning to find Denam, his strongest Behemoth, lose a large chunk of his Lyrium-body to the swing of the Qunari imposter’s battle-ax, glowing with enough magic to cleave the Lyrium in two. Until then, nothing had been able to destroy the behemoths and Samson was frozen a second too long in shock as the False Prophet brought his ax down again, a swift cut through Denam’s crystal face that left Lyrium shards scattering into the snow and Denam’s piercing, grating wail cut short in the still night air. The first of their men to fall. 

 

The Qunari warrior wasted no time then in slashing the rope holding the trebuchet in place and sending debris hurtling toward the mountainside where none of the soldiers were standing. Samson would have taken a moment to marvel at the stupidity of such a move had the mountain not immediately rumbled, ground shaking like the city of Kirkwall during the Chantry explosion, and a sheaf of snow thundering down the mountainside. The avalanche, while still not as large as it could have been given that Haven was completely surrounded by the Frostback Mountains, swept the Templars beneath the heavy blanket, a suffocating sheet of ice that sizzled and hissed against their Lyrium-heated skin. 

 

Though it slowed them down, though it cost them what should have been a swift victory in battle, the avalanche would not be enough to kill them, The Lyrium burned so hot that the Red Templars had learned months ago the balm of the cold air, the ice and snow, against their flesh. Samson had often sent them deeper into the cold Orlesian drifts when the fire became too much, blistering at their screaming skin, when the horrors and behemoths that his men had become, and the avalanche was an unwelcome but nonlethal balm to their battle and Lyrium-burned bodies. 

 

Above the heavy silence of the snow, Samson could hear Corypheus’ high dragon, a Red Lyrium-encrusted beast that glittered and gleamed with power, crying into the night as it laid low the village’s wooden houses and stone chantry with Lyrium-strengthened dragon fire. And when the silence reigned, Samson and his Templars dug themselves back to the surface, some wet and shivering from the prolonged exposure to the weight of the snow, they found the village leveled and Corypheus, seething in the snow with his Lyrium pet dragon at his side. The God sneered at them before wordlessly allowing the high dragon to sweep him away into the night, leaving the Templars to straggle back through the mountains to Orlais. 

 

**__________**

 

Because of their failure at Haven, a failure Corypheus admitted his own fault only in so far as underestimating the Qunari imposter, the ancient Magister sent for his growing supporters in Tevinter to join them in Orlais. He called them the Venatori, mage supremacist nationalists who wanted Corypheus to return all of Thedas to the Tevinter Imperium at its peak. The Red Templars were already ill at ease over their loss but bringing in mages whose sense of superiority over the rest of Thedas, over the Templars who had been there _first_ made tensions high within the camps. Though no one would speak their malcontent to the God it was not uncommon for Samson or the Venatori leader, Calpernia, a shrewd woman with formidable abilities and at least the faintest hint of agreeability and respect, were forced to rush around camp to break up the little fights and arguments that arose.

 

Samson knew that if Corypheus had been able to choose between receiving aid from the mages or the Templars, he’d have chosen the mages; he had been a magister himself and though Templars hadn’t existed in his time, didn’t really exist in Tevinter at all beyond a false title, dolls holding paper swords and shields, a shadow of real Templar power in the land where mages ruled. But in those early days when he had appeared in Kirkwall, the heart of the Mage-Templar war, the heart of the Chantry’s failure, it had been the Templars, it had been _Samson_ to whom he first extended his hand. That had to count for something. 

 

Calpernia was…. _fine_ … as far as Tevinter blood mages went. Samson couldn’t say he had met too many of them in his Kirkwall days with the exception of those who were slavers. He had tried, early on, to make a joke about that only to find himself pinned to the wall with Force magic despite the power of the Lyrium in his blood and her dagger at his throat. A threat. A warning. And after that he never mentioned slavery again and made sure his men knew not to broach the subject as well, even in the heat of their arguments. 

 

The Venatori pissed him off but they did their jobs well and it lessened the workload Samson’s Templars had to do. They proved themselves adept at smuggling more Red Lyrium along the Storm Coast for their Red Templar colleagues, and were doing something in the desert with the Wardens that Samson was fairly certain he didn’t want to know about even if Calpernia had been a forthcoming source of information. Years under the yoke of the Chantry still made his skin crawl at the thought of blood magic. Blood mages made sacrificial lambs of their victims; at least Samson’s men knew exactly what they were signing up for when they drank from the Red. Corypheus was content to keep their missions and assignments separate and for the moment Samson was more than content to let him. 

 

When word spread even to the Templars’ ears of the fall of the ancient Warden fortress Adamant and the death of the Ferelden with the bird name, Hawke, Samson had a moment of silence for the man in his tent. They hadn’t liked one another in Kirkwall, Hawke disgusted by Samson’s filth and addiction, Samson chafed by the Hawke’s privilege and blind devotion, but they had worked together to help protect the little magelings of Kirkwall, had fought side by side when Meredith’s madness took her. It had been strange to hear the Champion’s name everywhere after his dwarf companion wrote his novels and stranger still when he had gone missing. Samson found himself wondering what had become of the Darktown Healer who had started it all, and who would tell him of his Hake’s fate. He tried not to think of himself in that position, how Maddox would be told -how Maddox would or could even react- to the news should he fall in battle. Should the Red Lyrium take him. 

 

The Venatori and Templars had joint efforts, however, in manipulating the War of the Lions. The civil war brewing in Orlais was a convenient distraction from their own work and it was all too easy to manipulate both sides into a stand still. The Venatori used demons and the undead to lock away the armies of both the Grand Duke Gaspard and the Empress Celene in fortresses guarded by the dead. Not only did it keep their attention elsewhere but it forced the Inquisition -the old Seeker faction that had risen in the weeks following the destruction of Haven and the quick-spreading word of the False Prophet’s, the _Inquisitor’s_ , miraculous survival- to turn their attention to the Exalted Plains if they wanted to garner the favor of either side of the Orlesian Court. 

 

Corypheus wanted Orlais to fall either because its armies were keeping Tevinter in check or because the Chantry’s seat of power lay at its heart, it didn’t matter the _why_ if the result still got Samson and his Templars what they wanted: the complete destruction of the Andrastian Chantry. When Corypheus sent Calpernia to Val Royeaux to meet, or perhaps to seduce Samson wasn’t sure, their contact in the court, the Grand Duchess Florianne de Chalons who wanted both the Empress and the brother who overshadowed her death and the throne empty for her alone, Samson offered no protest. He had little patience or interest for the Great Game of Orlesian politics and even less with the seduction of their contact.

 

Things began to smooth over between the Red Templars and the Venatori. Their plans were, at least for the time being, working and though the shared space in the Shrine of Dumat made for tight quarters and hot tempers, weeks went by without major incident. So when Samson heard screaming and the clang of swords, the electric scent of magic, near Maddox’s tent he wasn’t sure what to expect, but it wasn’t to find Susanne, one of his most level-headed soldiers, threatening a Venatori mage. Wystan, who had by then fully succumbed the power of Lyrium, a hulking red monstrosity, had the mage by the scruff of his robes, his grating voice a threatening growl, and Susanne had her sword drawn and eyes hard. 

 

Samson strode forward, shouting at his men to drop the mage and sheath their weapons, demand from Susanne what could possibly have gotten her calmer blood worked into such a stupid frenzy when the maleficar made the mistake of opening his mouth. The Venatori mage, Prycis or Urathus or some other ridiculous haughty Tevinter name, was laughing despite the danger he was in, mouth bleeding in a sneer across his smug face. 

 

“It’s not even a _person,_ you stupid little soldiers. It can’t _feel_ anything. What should you care how I treat your master’s little pet? He’s luck we haven’t made an oculara out him yet. He has such a pretty _skull_ for it.”  


Samson’s stomach dropped then for behind his Templars, behind the mage bastard, Maddox stood in the shadows, a fresh bruise blooming across his cheekbone and he could barely contain himself from going after the mage himself with sword drawn. His Templars didn’t like the Tranquil, made uncomfortable by their toneless voices and blank faces, but they all knew better than to treat Maddox with anything but the utmost respect. Samson had often demanded of his men that they treat Maddox with the same amount of respect that they would he himself. If anyone in his ranks had ever questioned that they had never been foolish enough to voice it. 

 

Samson didn’t even think to stop and check on Maddox or to get further clarification from Susanne. He dragged the Venatori mage from Wystan’s grip, the behemoth releasing him quickly to Samson’s command, toward the tent where he knew Calpernia was meeting with Corypheus to discuss the upcoming ball at Halamshiral. There was nothing in his mind but blind anger and hatred. He hurled the mage through the tent flaps and followed, spitting fire. Was this, finally, the rage the Red would bring to him, or was it just because it was Maddox they had threatened, had hurt? 

 

Stepping over the mage on the floor, Samson grabbed ahold of Calpernia before she had time to react, to reach into the Fade and draw forth magic; he was a Templar whether Red or Blue and he could steal the mana from her breath before she could conjure anything to defend herself. He held aloft and knew how easy it would be to crush her thin throat beneath his fists. The spark of fear in her eyes before she covered it with rage only further fueled him.

 

“What,” he growled, “the fuck. Is an oculara?”

 

It was Corypheus who answered. The God had not moved from his seat at the table as Samson had stormed in, blazing with rage and attacked his Left Hand. 

 

“The Ocularum are sight-seers made from the skulls of the Tranquil. They have unique abilities, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.” He spoke leisurely, as if explaining to a misbehaving child why they were in the wrong. “Alexius, one of my more prolific mages, discovered that forcing the possession of a Tranquil and then immediately taking their skulls gives the viewer a unique perspective.”

 

During the explanation, Samson’s grip had slacked and Calpernia dropped to the tent floor, glaring up at him and touching her tender throat which was sure to bear bruises much darker than Maddox’s. Just as Samson knew better than kill her, Calpernia knew better than to attack him in front of their God, even to defend herself. The Elder One had given her orders and she had followed them. She cared little for Samson’s feelings about his Tranquil pet. 

 

Jabbing a finger at the Venatori mage who had been wise enough to stay on the ground in the face of Samson’s rage and Corypheus’ indifference, Samson demanded that his life be taken. He put his hands on Maddox. He needed to die. Samson didn’t like Calpernia’s men and though scuffles had broken out amongst the ranks, there had been no abuse. 

 

Wordlessly, Corypheus reached out with a stroke of magic and ended the mage’s life. Calpernia put up no protest. 

 

“Tell the rest of the Venatori to leave Samson’s Tranquil be, Calpernia. Its abilities with the Lyrium are most useful.”

 

Later Samson would find Maddox in his tent and hold ice to his friend’s bruised cheek, staunchly avoiding the Tranquil’s blank gaze boring into him. 

 

“You should not have done that, Samson,” he said quietly and Samson ignored him, shifting his grip on the ice, bringing his other hand to cup Maddox’s chin. “Mages do not like the Tranquil; the reactions of the Venatori to your attachment to me is not unexpected.” 

 

Samson closed his eyes, wincing. “Don’t-“ he muttered, but Maddox kept speaking.

 

“You are irrational where I am concerned. You must be careful to achieve your cause. I am not worth the cost of your mission, Samson. You know that.” 

 

But he didn’t.

 

**__________**

 

It wasn’t just the Red Templars who would be feeling the effects of the Red Lyrium’s power. Though Corypheus sent Samson and his men to Sahrnia, a small village in Emprise du Lion of northern Orlais, to mine for the precious mineral, they quickly realized it would not be enough for their entire army. The only way they knew it was manufactured was in their own flesh, thriving on its attachment to a living being.The Red Lyrium was alive and so it needed a life to latch onto, to grow. And so Samson bartered with the town’s leader, Mistress Poulin, for the lives of her men and made a mine of the people of Sahrnia. They both knew that if she refused to sell the citizens of her choice, he would send his Templars to kill her and take whoever they wanted. 

 

It was no longer about choice. They needed the Lyrium. They would mine it in the people of Sahrnia and in themselves. He ordered Paxley, a boy a few years older than Wystan who had joined the Order in Kirkwall around the time he himself had been thrown out on his ass, to watch after the mines, to give the men -both Templar and Sahrnia citizens, as much elfroot as they needed to alleviate the pain of the transformations. Their pain had purpose all right but it didn’t mean he would watch them all suffer if he could help it. Samson was a coward but he wasn't needlessly cruel.

 

After the incident with Calpernia’s Venatori daring to injure Maddox, Samson sent his Tranquil friend to Sahrnia to work on the armor where the Lyrium was plenty and the Venatori few. He ordered Paxley to treat Maddox in the same way, with the same respect he would treat Samson himself. Maddox was, as far as Samson was concerned, an extension of himself with dealing with his Templars. And after Samson had attacked Calpernia and received no punishment, after he had ordered the Venatori bastard killed and the Elder One had obliged, no one dared approach the Tranquil with anything but a sense of reverence. 

 

The armor was almost complete. Samson had tried it on before he sent Maddox away and the fire of it sent him crashing to his knees. Drinking the Lyrium had never felt like that, like his skin was burning away and his bones were were being coated in hot metal, muscles and mind screaming as everything was ripped open and melted back together at once. He had been screaming aloud without realizing it and only came back to himself when Maddox calmly pulled the armor from his body, where he had been twitching on the floor from the immense pain and power of it all, and handed him a glass of water. The armor would need work for Samson to find it wearable, however painful, without being instantly burned up with its fire. And for Maddox to work on it he needed a quieter and safer place than the Shrine of Dumat, just for long enough to finish the armor.

 

So Samson sent him away though it made his chest clench to watch him go. Every time he had to leave Maddox to go on a mission or fight in a battle with his Red Templars he wondered if he would return, if he would see Maddox again. But it was his duty as the Red General, as a Templar and a soldier, to fight and to protect his men. Watching Maddox leave while he stayed behind - that was much harder, he found.

 

Samson also, irrationally as Maddox would have told him had he still been there, feared Maddox knowing what they were doing at Sahrnia, the lives they were taking. Maddox could not think less of him, didn’t have an opinion of him at all most likely -though it pained Samson to admit- besides an old hint of the friendship they had formed over the years. The guilt Samson felt when he thought of the men and women locked in cages at Sahrnia, waiting to be force-fed Lyrium at much higher doses to drive the growth of Lyrium fast enough to supply his armies, was almost more than he could bear even with the Red Lyrium strengthening his mind and leveling his emotions. He needed a vial to think about those in his ranks who had become crystal behemoths and monsters, two if the monster on his mind was Wystan, but _they_ had at least had the choice, the knowledge of what the were giving up in exchange for the power. 

 

**__________**

 

Things were not going according to plan. Whatever Corypheus had sent the Venatori to accomplish with the Wardens in the Western Approach had failed. Their attempts to keep Orlais and the Inquisition busy with the War of the Lions fell apart at the Winter Ball in Halamshiral when the False Prophet forced an agreement between the Grand Duke Gaspard de Chalons, the Empress Celene Valmont, and the Elven Ambassador Briala. Their contact within the Orlesian court, Grand Duchess Florianne de Chalons, was unsuccessful in her assignation of the Empress, their last bid to take control of the country. The mines of Sahrnia were liberated and all of the men Samson had stationed there butchered. All around them, the Elder One's efforts were being blocked and barricaded by the Inquisition's forces.

 

While Samson was painfully familiar with failure, counting most of his time in Kirkwall as a resounding defeat in all measures of his life, it became clear to him and indeed to all of the Templars that failure was not an ending to which their New God was accustomed.  Samson’s men and women still believed in Corypheus with their entire beings, would still follow wherever he lead them, but they began to wonder if he was leading them to their destruction. The Templars were willing to give up anything to see the Chantry that had abused them destroyed: their bodies and minds, their loved ones, their humanity. In the end, it had to all be worth it and though no dissent was voiced or indeed planned, there was a sadness amongst Samson’s troops that hadn’t been there before, that they might not achieve their goal. 

 

There was a well, Corypheus told Samson one evening, deep in the Arbor Wilds in an ancient elven temple. The elves called it Vir’Abelasan, _The Well of Sorrows._ It held an indescribable power, a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that would allow him to walk into the Fade without the power of the Anchor, thus giving him the opportunity to completely sidestep the False Prophet and retake the Black City, the throne of the Gods, that had been denied him. Samson would be his Vessel, his most trusted advisor who would drink from the Well and learn all its power and history. Samson would be the one to bring back to knowledge to Corypheus and walk at his side into the Fade.

 

Corypheus had Samson gather what remained of their army of Templars and Venatori to march on the Arbor Wilds. They would not, he told Samson, be returning to the Shrine of Dumat. Theirs was to be a guaranteed victory, but they would need all of their forces for the Temple of Mythal was likely to be well-guarded by ancient elves and older magic. The finished armor made Samson a fortress in both mind and body and he and he alone would be strong enough to carry the Well. 

 

A small number of Templars, just a handful of soldiers and Behemoths would need to stay behind and destroy any evidence of their presence at the Shrine. The Inquisition was moving swiftly through Ferelden and Orlais, desperate to stop Samson and Corypheus’ next move and it was only a matter of time before they were discovered. Maddox volunteered himself to destroy the last of his papers and designs for Samson’s armor and anything else from the smithing tent that the Templars would not think to destroy and Samson’s heart clenched in his chest. 

 

“It’s too dangerous, Maddox. You can’t protect yourself if they come.” 

 

But he couldn’t take Maddox with him to the Arbor Wilds either. It would just as if not more difficult to protect him there. Maddox knew that with all the logic and reason of Tranquility and he did not have to say it as the realization played over Samson’s face. 

 

Pulling Maddox into the tightest hug he could manage, Samson pressed his lips over the Lyrium brand that marred his friend’s temple and held him for long minutes, as long as the Tranquil would let him. 

 

“Do what you must, but you come back to me, do you understand?” He held Maddox’s chin in his hand and forced the mage to look him in the eye. “Come back safe to me when it is done.” 

 

Maddox did not hold his gaze.

 

“I will.”


	5. Kiss from the Grave

Samson woke up on the floor of a cell. He hadn’t expected to wake up at all. Funny how often he thought that. He hadn’t expected to live after he lost his position as a city guardsman and his source of money and shelter, the odd vial of Lyrium, went dry. He hadn’t expected -or wanted- to wake up when the withdrawal had its claws deep in his bones and he was curled under the stairs on the docks of Kirkwall and praying for death to escape the pain of it all. Samson hadn’t expected to survive the battle for the Gallows when Knight-Captain Meredith lost herself to the Red Lyrium and her own madness. He’d watched his men fall to the Red Lyrium themselves, becoming crystal monstrosities with no minds or humanity and had waited patiently for his turn, for the day he would wake up to find Lyrium shards where his fingers had been or a glow to his spine. 

 

None of the Red Templars had expected to survive the war, ready and willing to pour out all of their own blood in service to Corypheus. And when that had failed, so wholly and utterly failed and the False Prophet was looking down at him over his battle-ax, the Lyrium ripped from his armor, the last thing Maddox had touched, Samson had expected - _finally_ \- to meet his end. 

 

And then he woke up. Again. And Samson wondered, not for the first time, if the Maker or whatever there might be or not be at the end of everything, just didn’t want him back. Even the dark of the Abyss, so far from the Maker’s Light, would have been better than this. 

 

Everything _hurt,_ a soreness he hadn’t felt in decades. The armor Maddox had crafted him, inlaid expertly with Lyrium, metal woven with its power, had allowed him to march for weeks without stopping, gave him the power of twenty men. Nothing could have stopped him. When the False Prophet Inquisitor had ripped it from him, blown it from his body with one rune, it had been like snatching a cane from a crippled man and sending him crashing to the ground. He had collapsed, shaking, until the rage built up, aided by the Lyrium in his bones if not by Red in the armor, enough to scream for his Templars to kill them all and the battle had begun. 

 

It had been not been a long fight, he remembered distantly. Blinded by rage and pain and without the armor to bolster him, he had been no match for the Qunari Inquisitor. Samson had stayed conscious just long enough to see the last of his men, Wystan, Annike, Grant, crushed beneath Inquisition’s forces. One by one they all fell, his Templars who had followed him without question to their end, destroyed before his eyes. Like everything else he had touched, turning to ash in his mouth. 

 

The pain of the battle, of the Lyrium’s song fading from his blood, of the loss of his men and of _Maddox…_ The pain grounded him to the cell floor though there was a metal cot but a few steps away. He allowed his head to slump against the cool stone and his mind to go blissfully blank. 

 

It was a technique he had taught himself back in the Gallows those years ago. Even in the Templar barracks it was common to hear screams at night: there were some nightmares the Lyrium couldn’t blanket and smooth away. There were things you couldn’t unsee. And so to preserve his sanity Samson had taught himself to focus on one thing, his roommate’s breathing, his own heartbeat, the measured steps of the Templar on patrol. It had centered him then and again when he had been tossed out onto the streets, when he was strung out and shaking on the docks and had reached out for the steady crash of the waves against the hulls of the ships. His camp in the Shrine of the Dumat had been full of the gentle clatter for him to hone in on when the Red Lyrium wasn’t doing quite enough to calm him. Often, he had found himself in Maddox’s tent for the company, for the Lyrium scent heavy in the air, for the rhythmic and controlled clanging of the Tranquil’s hammer on the hot steel, and if he reached further, pushed past even that, he could hear Maddox’s breathing, even and unwavering as always and it would settle his heart. 

 

The cells of the Inquisition were cold, set deep in the mountainside and crumbling in places. The mountain air rushed in, whistling, through the gaping breaks in the fortress’ walls. There was a waterfall, somewhere not far from his cell and Samson reached for it, an unremitting thunder. His Templars had liked the cold, find the snow capped mountains and blanketed plateaus of Northern Orlais to be a balm for their blistering and crystalized skin. The drip of water had often soothed them to sleep when the fits of heat took them. They had been eager to take over the mines of the Storm Coast just to be nearer to the constant rush of the water around them, the patter of the ever-falling rain.

 

Samson closed his eyes and let his mind go blank of his men’s faces as they fell to the power of the Inquisitor and his followers, of the anguish churning beneath his skin and his breaking bones and the horror of the unknown in his undecided fate. He let the roar of the water, the chill of the breeze, course through him and wash away everything else until it was all there was in all the world, until Samson himself faded into the chilled stone of the cell floor and unconscious took him once more.

 

**__________**

 

It was several days more before the Inquisitor had Samson brought up from the dungeons to be judged. Samson only knew the passage of time by the shadows cast through his cell from behind the collapsed outer wall some few cells over, and from the Inquisition scouts tossing food into his cell twice a day -it wouldn’t do well for the Inquisition’s image, of course, to haul him up in chains half-starved and delirious. 

 

Samson had heard of the Qunari False Prophet and his judgments from his men’s reports. The Inquisitor was a soft-hearted fool. He had not swung his sword more than once, according to the reports, preferring instead to have traitors and miscreants work to repay their debts; he gave people a chance who deserved none. The Qunari had only taken one life, Samson knew. One of Calpernia’s men and he wondered what the Venatori snake had done to find himself on the business end of the Inquisitor’s sword when the crimes of no other had warranted it. Samson wondered what they could possibly have in store for him other than to take his life. If any of the False Prophet’s enemies had deserved the swift swing of a sword and then nothingness, it was him.

 

Two soldiers dragged Samson, in chains, through the fortress to the Inquisitor’s seat of power, to receive his sentence. Even without the bulking armor, the Qunari was massive, taking up most of the throne. He had a kind face, or what must pass for one for his race, that he was training to look hard and indifferent though the warmth shone through when he looked at his men. Samson knew that look, the pride in your company, the love for them. 

 

There was a crowd in the room and the balcony above: many had come to see the Red General tried and punished, wondering if he would give them a show. Samson was not in the mood to be hospitable, to give the leering masses what they wanted, but when Cullen Rutherford stepped up to read his charges, he wasn’t sure he’d have a choice in the matter. Rutherford had always riled his blood even more than the Lyrium ever head, his blind devotion to Knight-Commander Meredith, his willful ignorance of the abuses of the Kirkwall mages and abandonment of the city’s Templars right when they most needed him. And now to stand before Samson and act as if his hands were clean, as if Samson was the true traitor. 

 

“The blood on his hands cannot be measured,” the Knight-Captain said, arms crossed tight over his chest, looking down at Samson at the Inquisitor’s feet like he had once looked at frightened magelings. And for once he wasn’t wrong. Samson felt soaked in blood, though not the blood Rutherford meant. Rutherford would hardly consider the Red Templars to be worthy and it was _their_ blood that coated his hands. “His head is too valuable to take; Kirkwall, Orlais, many would see him suffer. I can’t say I’m not one of them.” 

 

Samson sneered in response to the Knight-Captain’s words and the Inquisitor’s reply to take the punishment as seriously as the crimes with which Samson was charged. Whatever end they saw fit to give him, if they truly weren't intending to take his head, would be stolen by the Red Lyrium. It was only a matter of time before it took him and now, without the protection that Corypheus offered, the delay that aided Samson’s own resistance, it would with any ounce of luck, take him before any punishment of the Inquisition’s could take hold. 

 

Rutherford snarled at him for that, challenging his loyalty to such a creature, as if he had any right to talk about _loyalty_. Corypheus had poisoned the Order with its consent, unlike the Chantry force-feeding them the Blue like baby birds desperate for their Revered Mothers to tip the sick-sweet down their throats without ever understanding the risks of it. Samson had at least made sure the men knew what they were giving up. 

 

“Templars have always been used,” Samson growled, unable to keep his temper under control. _Used to kill thousands,_ Rutherford had said as if the Chantry didn’t order them to slaughter mages on the daily lately, as if they hadn’t just witnessed the Right of Annulment used in Kirkwall, in the White Spire, in Dairsmuid of Rivain. How many magelings had Templars been forced to slaughter and tossed aside when their usefulness ended, like he had been. At least Corypheus had been willing to help them _try_ to burn out the Chantry that abused them and build it anew. At least Corypheus had allowed them to die at their _best_ and not lying in the chokedamp or feeble-minded and blissed out on Lyrium until their hearts gave out in their beds. 

 

And then they dared bring Maddox into it. His unwavering loyalty, his trust in Samson and in Samson’s cause that had brought about his demise. Samson wondered then who had been with Maddox when he died. If Rutherford had been there to her his last words and whether he’d been cruel. Chains or not he’d wring the Ferelden bastard’s neck if he let Maddox’s name cross his lips one more time. 

 

“He killed himself. _For you._ ” 

 

Samson hadn’t let himself think about it until then and it was still almost unfathomable. Tranquil valued their lives even if their dreams, emotions and passion had been burned from their minds. He had expected that one of the False Prophet’s men, maybe even a Templar like Rutherford and or the Seeker woman he had followed, had put Maddox to the sword and it had fueled his hatred in their final battle. But by his own hand… The ice beneath Samson cracked and he felt himself falling through it into the dark and the cold and he tugged desperately at the fading Lyrium in his bones to draw on the anger again before he fell apart. 

 

“They were always going to die.” He had known what Corypheus was doing, they had all known. “So yes, I fed them Hope instead of Despair. I made them believe their pain had purpose. Just like the Chantry does, right Knight-Captain?” Hope that they could create a better world for the Templars to come. That the pain of their transformations and mutilations had _purpose_ , to rip out the Chantry by its roots. The Chantry had made them believe the Lyrium made them strong enough to fight back the filthy and dangerous mages, that they were doing the Maker’s work, protecting His Children from his greatest curse. 

 

In the end, despite all his efforts, Samson wasn’t really any different from the Chantry he hated, from Meredith, the Knight-Commander who had destroyed his life. And at once the fight fled him, head drooping and unable to meet the soft sad look the Inquisitor was giving him. _Pity._ It grated at his raw nerves but there wasn’t enough in him to be angry again. “It ended as well as anything else I’ve done,” he murmured, more to himself than the rest of the courtroom. Samson’s life had been marked by failure; this was no different. “I’ll tell your people what they want. Everything I cared about is destroyed.” 

 

Samson could have laughed when they ordered him to serve the Inquisition and gave him to Rutherford of all people to be his handler. There was nothing worthy left in him and Rutherford was the man to know that most acutely. He said as much and the former Knight-Captain agreed. It was a kindness he did not deserve and clearly the crowd that had traveled far and wide to see him suffer agreed, a scattering of irritated objections playing out through the great hall. Samson suspected it was because they all knew he was right and they Lyrium would kill him before they could get anything much more than information from him. It wouldn’t have stopped Samson from putting the Qunari to death had their places been reversed. It seemed more a punishment for Rutherford than for him.

 

_“You served something greater than yourself once_.” Rutherford had said. But what had that ever been? Even if he had failed, even if he helped the Inquisition defeat Corypheus and destroy the Elder One’s plans, it didn’t change what a monstrosity the Chantry was and how it had perpetuated years of abuse of its mages and Templars. The Templar Order had been poisoned long before Samson accepted that vial of Red Lyrium in The Hanged Man. Wanting to help his brothers and sisters in arms, wanting to protect the mages…That was the greatest thing Samson had ever done and it had ended as could have been expected looking at everything he done in his life. 

 

**__________**

 

The scouts who marched Samson back to his dungeon cell -just until they could empty out a room near enough to Rutherford that he could be watched like the traitor he was, the Inquisitor had promised, as if Samson’s comfort level was something he should be concerned with- were silent as they shoved him in just hard enough to make his chained feet stumble and clanged the door closed and locked it. They were angry. Disgusted with their soft-hearted leader’s decision. Rutherford had been right - many would have seen him suffer. But they did nothing, perhaps knowing what punishment would come from toying with a prisoner once his sentence was passed, or perhaps out of respect for their Inquisitor despite disagreeing with his perceived weakness, but spit vitriol through the bars of the cell and walk away, leaving him alone. 

 

It was only after the door to the dungeons closed that Samson’s legs gave out and he collapsed against the cool stone, shaking like a new bird with a broken wing. The False Prophet, the Inquisitor, had given him back his life and he wasn’t sure he wanted it. Samson had always known the war would take him, would take them all and he had been handed to the enemy on a silver platter, his own weakness delivered him to the Inquisition’s hands. And the Inquisitor had looked him in the eye and carefully set him back on solid ground unharmed. He didn’t deserve it, didn’t _want_ it. What was he to do with the life he never expected or wanted to have? 

 

And Maddox was gone. When the Inquisitor had said those words, _Maddox is dead_ , Samson’s entire world had whited out, blasted apart like the Kirkwall Chantry until all that remained were those three words. He had let the anger, the Lyrium, take him then it had failed him. Since waking up in his cell, Samson had done everything he could to not think about it. It was a disservice to Maddox, his friend, the boy he had saved and the boy he had loved so quietly for so long, to push away all thought of him but it had hurt _too much_. Even if Samson had had the Lyrium to temper the anguish it would have torn him apart and in the darkness of his cell there was no Lyrium to hold back to rushing tide. 

 

Because the Inquisitor had said his name. And Cullen Rutherford, whose lips were no more worthy of forming Maddox’s name than Samson was himself after everything, had said his name. And he knew now just how his friend had died. A _suicide_ ; Samson hadn’t thought the Tranquil were even capable of committing suicide. He himself had thought about it, when living on the streets when the Lyrium had been dry for weeks or for months and he thought he was dying and knew it would be quicker and less painful to wade into the Waking Sea and never look back. But he had been desperate and in pain. The Tranquil didn’t have emotions or passions or strong connections. What logic could Maddox have seen that his own death seemed the best choice? 

 

He had told Maddox, ordered him, _begged_ him, to come back safe and his friend had taken his own life in response. “For you,” Rutherford had said, voice dripping with disgust and disbelief. For him. How could he have led Maddox to such an end? Everything he had done, everything he had given up, was for his Templars to have a better life. And for _Maddox_ who had deserved so very much more than the world have given him. And look where it had ended his friend, the mage he had loved. With him dead and Samson somehow still with air in his lungs he didn’t want or deserve.

 

Samson lay shaking on the floor of the cell, chest tight and breath rasping. He couldn’t _breathe,_ no matter how much air he was gasping in it felt like he was drowning hands shaking as hard as they ever had when the Thirst had him in its grip. He felt chilled and boiling all at once, fever shivers rocking down his spine. Reaching for the roar of the water, the Lyrium in his bones for something, anything, to ground him, he fell short. There was nothing beneath him but the chasm of grief that had opened up in the stone floor and threatened to swallow him whole. His face was wet and his heaving breath was leaving him like a wounded animal, in sobs and howls he had just enough sense to muffle with his fist, cutting his knuckles against his teeth in an effort to stay silent. 

 

And in the cells beneath Skyhold, Samson began to grieve. 

 

**__________**

 

There wasn’t much time to rest, not that Samson had expected it. Three days after his judgment was passed there were two other scouts showing up at his cell with Rutherford himself, dressed up in his ludicrous lion’s mane of a pelt across his pauldrons that made him look like a puppy in a ridiculous costume more than a man commanding the respect of the Inquisition’s army, and hand resting threateningly on the hilt of his sword. Should Samson try anything, the threat was wordless yet clear. Samson was a lot of things: a lovesick fool, a coward, a _traitor to the Order_ , but he wasn’t an idiot. He may not have been sure he wanted the life the Inquisitor handed him but at the very least he owed the False Prophet -Inquisitor Samson supposed he should call him without Corypheus’ yoke around his neck, without the Tevinter Magister’s lie of godliness surrounding him- a debt. 

 

There was a room made available for him, a broom closet with a cot shoved in the corner just off from the Commander’s own quarters so that he could be closely watched, but before he was pushed there like an unsightly object to be stowed away and ignored, he was brought before the Inquisitor and his advisors: Rutherford and the Seeker bitch for whom he had left the Templars in Kirkwall; a sweet-faced Antivan who introduced herself to him as if he were an honored foreign dignitary and not a prisoner of war; a woodland witch who looked down her nose at him like she hadn’t joined the Inquisitor in the Arbor Wilds to get ahold of the Well’s power herself; and a red-headed assassin who sent chills down his spine when her cold eyes found his. The left hand of the Divine, the Nightingale. Her, Samson had heard of. 

 

They sat him down in a chair and pushed scroll upon scroll of maps at him. They needed to know where every last faction of Corypheus’ army was holed up. The Tevinter Magister had disappeared it seemed after the battle in the Arbor Wilds had been lost -yet another failure the darkspawn creature couldn’t handle- along with his Red Lyrium dragon and tensions were high in Skyhold as they waited for the last hammer to fall, for the final battle to begin. 

 

The Venatori leader, Calpernia, had abandoned Corypheus or so the Inquisitor informed him, and Samson could barely contain his shock. The blood mage had been determined to see her homeland returned to its glory; if Samson had been willing to spill his blood for Corypheus in order to save his Templars, then Calpernia had been willing to rip out her still-beating heart, but when he tried to press the issue, discover the reason for her treachery, Rutherford silenced him by pushing the maps forward and smacking them impatiently. The action made Samson want to lounge back in his chair, demand wine and some expensive cheese before he went any further but the looks on the faces of the Inquisitor and his advisors told him his wit would find no appreciation there.

 

The Inquisitor knew now where their base of operations had been, in the Shrine of Dumat he had invaded and swept out. The Templar’s mines at Sahrnia had been destroyed and Suledin’s keep, where Samson had sent some of his best men to control the Dales highlands, had been reclaimed in the name of the Inquisition and its forces, his men, cleaned out. He had never been fully aware of all of the camps the Venatori had set up. He knew they preferred to work in the desert like their homeland, but where and how many camps with forces in what numbers were lost on him. Without their leader, he assumed the Venatori would eventually fall apart as Samson knew of no second-in-command to rise up and take Calpernia’s place. 

 

Samson wondered the same of his own straggling men left scattered across Ferelden and Orlais. The majority of their forces had joined him in the Arbor Wilds and found their end there. Samson found himself distracted by that line of thought, wondering what would become of Wystan’s crystalized body, if the wilds would take him back like it had the Elven Temple; it had been a pretty place…Wystan deserved to rest in a pretty place like that. Maddox would not have had the same end. The Shrine of Dumat was cold and crumbling and Samson’s chest ached to think the boy he had loved, the boy he still loved, had been laid to rest in such a place. 

 

If the choice had been with him, Samson would have chosen to stop then, trudge back to his broom closet and collapse into the cot. But choice was not a luxury he deserved or had been afforded and so, taking a few sharp short breaths that went carefully ignored by the the Inquisitor, who cast his violet eyes away and let Samson have a moment to collect himself, before they moved on. He was very strange, the Inquisitor Adaar. 

 

Pointing out the little pockets of Red Templars he knew to have camps, or Red Lyrium sites likely to house his wayward men, felt like much more of a betrayal than anything else. Corypheus had been his New God and, for a time, his savior, but he was still a power above Samson, a figure of authority and oppression as much as he had promised to free them of their chains. Betraying Corypheus took a few coarse words; betraying his _men,_ sending the Inquisition and its forces to their unsuspecting camps to butcher them. That was different. Samson’s hands shook with more than the growing Thirst as he touched the placed on the maps where his men might be, bartering their lives for his own freedom like the coward he had always been, voice low and rough. _He was supposed to take care of them, his men._

 

Rutherford fought him on every position and for once Samson couldn’t blame him. He could very easily be leading the Inquisition’s forces into trap. He could be sending them on fools errands halfway across Thedas to get them out of the way for Corypheus to swoop in and attack the unsuspecting and unprotected. There was little he could do to prove his honesty but confirm every question the Inquisitor and his advisors asked him, old camps and plans, numbers of men, things he wasn’t sure the Inquisition had found out about. The Storm Coast, the cave systems beneath Emprise du Lion, the Emerald Graves. 

 

Between Rutherford and the Nightingale pressing him, twisting his words until he wasn’t sure what he had confirmed or denied and where on which map he was indicating, and the burning scream of the Lyrium’s need in his bones making him sweat and shake in his seat, Samson wasn’t sure anymore what he was saying and he wanted desperately to be done with this. 

 

The third time the Seeker pointed out something he had contradicted with an earlier bit of information, Samson felt and looked lost and the Inquisitor called them to stop. The kind-faced Qunari leader leaned back in his chair, giving Samson a long lake that made him shiver despite the sweat slicking his tunic to his back, and announced them to be done for the day. The advisors, even the Antivan Ambassador, immediately protested and Samson surprised them -and himself- by agreeing with them. 

 

“I can keep going. Just got myself mixed up.” He ignored the snort from the Commander and met the Qunari Inquisitor’s violet eyes. “I’m not lying. I can talk more. I can give you more.” 

 

The Inquisitor wouldn’t hear it, waving a large gray hand to silence the protestations and saying that they had time enough to come back in the morning. It was a lie, of course, they had no idea how long they could possibly have before Corypheus struck and Samson did not know enough of his plans beyond taking the wisdom of the Well of Sorrows to give much to give them warning. But as he looked up and realized the sun was near setting and they had been sitting without pause for the entire day, he slumped back, the fight leaving him, and nodded. 

 

It was the Inquisitor to walk Samson to his chambers, a job that could have easily been delegated to a scout or simple warrior. In his current state, Lyrium-weakened and shivering, Samson posed little threat to anyone. The power the Red Lyrium had given him, to march for weeks, to take down ten men with a single swing of _Certainty_ , had crumbled without the Lyrium singing in his blood. Samson had gone from a formidable war general to a somewhat feisty tomcat and so no protestations were given when the Inquisitor insisted on taking Samson to his room alone.

 

There would be a guard posted outside his door, he was warned, as well as Rutherford mere feet away in his office. The Inquisitor insisted that food be sent up to his room to save Samson the trip -possibly the danger- of finding his way to the great hall to eat despite Samson’s assurances that he would not likely be able to keep any food down in his current state. Some broth perhaps, and a good deal of water, but nothing heavier would be wise to chance. He was well-versed in withdrawal at this point, he joked lowly and the Inquisitor frowned and stopped them both in the doorway to Samson’s broom closet with a hand -too gentle to belong to warrior and leader, let alone a Qunari one. 

 

Cool violet eyes studied Samson and he felt as pierced by them as he had by Corypheus’ that night they had first met in Kirkwall. “We have Lyrium you know,” The Inquisitor offered, the absolute last thing Samson had expected him to say. “Not Red of course, but we have a steady supply -good connections with the Carta- to provide our mages and Templars with the Blue Lyrium they need to perform their duties.” The Qunari tilted his head and Samson got the strange feeling that the Inquisitor was actually concerned about him. “This will hurt you, I know. If the Lyrium would ease your pain, I will order it given to you.”  


And that was the ultimate temptation. No one of his Red Templars had ever experienced withdrawal from the Red long enough to know what it was really like. It stuck to their bones longer than the Blue ever had and it gave them immeasurably more strength. It stood to reason the having it ripped away as he was soon to find out, would be immensely more painful than with the Blue. Withdrawal had nearly killed him several times on the streets of Kirkwall, had made him do things he couldn’t think about even now without feeling sick with himself. _Olivia. Feynriel. Thrask._ Names he hadn’t let himself think of in years. 

 

The Red Lyrium would kill him anyway. Likely within the year. The dangers of the Blue didn’t apply to such a short lifespan. All it would do was ease the pain of his passing. The Inquisitor was dangling it before him, like one of Maddox’s paper birds, like a vial of Red Lyrium in the hands of a darkspawn stranger in the shadows of the The Hanged Man. He found himself, despite everything, shaking his head. Compared to what his men had suffered, this was the least of what he deserved.

 

“We buried him you know,” The Inquisitor said as Samson slumped, exhausted and spent, into his cot. 

 

A terrified swooping dropped the bottom from his stomach and the nausea roared back. He knew who the Inquisitor was referring to but was afraid to ask for clarification. 

 

“Your Maddox,” the Qunari supplied, unprompted. “We brought him back here and gave him a proper burial. He had known what Samson had been thinking hours before when he needed the few minutes to compost himself before continuing to give out information. “I wouldn’t have left him in that place.” 

 

**__________**

 

For all their preparation, days of Samson giving as much information as he could in as much detail as he could muster, of ignoring the sharp looks and sharper comments from Rutherford to keep from decking him right there in the War Room and destroying the tentative relationship he had built with the Inquisition by knocking its commander on his ass no matter how he deserved it, when Corypheus and his dragon reappeared at the Temple of Sacred Ashes where the Qunari’s path had begun. 

 

Most of the Inquisition’s forces were still in the Arbor Wilds, destroying the last of Samson’s men and Calpernia’s wayward Venatori. There was no army to defend the Inquisitor against the Darkspawn Magister Samson had worshipped as a New God, only a handful of the Qunari’s close companions and no chance to wait for the army to return in time. 

 

Samson wondered if he should volunteer to join the final battle, to help kill the thing he had risen up or die trying, but there was little use he would be to the Inquisitor in a fight. And less use afterwards no matter the outcome. He had given up the information he had. If the Inquisition triumphed there was nothing more he could offer them. If the Inquisitor failed and the Magister was the lats one standing… well it wouldn’t matter then what Samson had said or hadn’t said or what use he could have been. The world would end, just like he had wanted, and he would go with it. 

 

There was nothing any of those left behind, Samson, the advisors, and the frightened townspeople who had taken refuge there, could do but watch as the Inquisitor set off down the mountain with his companions to decide the fate of the rest of the world. Samson found himself closing his eyes, found his mouth murmuring words he thought he had long tossed aside and forgotten: “Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter.” 

 

Behind him, Samson heard a scoff and was not surprised when he turned his head to find Rutherford scowling at him. 

 

“You dare speak the Makers words, the Chant of Light when you abandoned everything holy for your _new God_?” The words came out a snarl and Samson watched the commander, feeling more passive than he had in years in the face of Rutherford’s anger. The Ferelden was frightened, Samson could tell, and Rutherford had a tendency to lash out when frightened, like the cornered pup he was. Not so different from Samson himself, though it pained him to say it. 

 

But the former Knight-Captain wasn’t done, frustrated that he hadn’t gotten the rise out of Samson he was looking for. Rutherford was gunning for a fight to burn off some of that fear and anger in him. “You did this,” he hissed, as if Samson didn’t already know, stepping up to corner him against the stone wall. “You helped him get this powerful. You helped him poison the Order and destroy everything it stood for. You were always _weak_ and your leadership proved it. You lead good men, good Templars to monstrous deaths for nothing but your own cowardice.” 

 

Samson almost wished he could give the Commander the hot wet anger he so badly wanted but there was nothing left in him but what was bone dry and brittle. When he spoke the words were resigned.”Every one of those Templars would have suffered until nothing was left. And _then_ be forced to kill and die. I gave them _hope_. Just like the Chantry. Just like _you_.” He shook his head. “But I’m weak and _you’re_ a savior, is that right?” 

 

Rutherford’s eyes were blazing and his hands were shaking and frozen where they held Samson against the wall. The Thirst had him firmly in its grasp. Samson felt a twinge of pity he didn’t want to feel starting at the center of his chest. The last time he had seen the withdrawal tugging at the commander’s bones they had been in Kirkwall and he had felt a sick pleasure at the man understanding even a hint of what the Chantry had done to him. 

 

But the Inquisitor had told him that Rutherford had _intentionally_ stopped taking the Lyrium when he joined the Inquisition, that he likely hadn’t had any since he abandoned the Kirkwall Templars at the city gates with the Seeker. Samson had thought the Qunari a liar -no one could just quit taking the Lyrium cold turkey for over a year and still be standing- but standing before him now: seeing that twitch of his muscles contracting involuntarily, the way he was leaning on Samson as much as he was trying to pin him to the wall, hands cold to the touch and trembling, eyes wild. Samson knew it was true. 

 

It was only the crash of lightening, green and glowing like the Breach, far in the distance outside the window that made separated the two, Rutherford’s head jerking up and the snarl fading from his face to be replaced with a look of worry. He pushed past Samson, anger forgotten, to press a hand against the glass and Samson stepped aside to let him, eyes downcast. He didn’t want to watch; he didn’t want to know how the battle was going and where it would leave his end when it was over. 

 

When the Commander began to pray, fervent and feverish with his head bowed and trembling hands clasped tight, Samson silently echoed the words in his mind, felt them bouncing hollowly in his chest. He didn’t touch the Commander but stood silently at his side as they watched the far off battle that would determine the fate of the world. 

 

**__________**

 

 

The worst part of the Inquisitor emerging victorious from the final battle with the Elder One was that Samson was still alive when the withdrawal hit him at its hardest. Thedas was saved and the world was rejoicing while Samson lay sweating and sick on his cot. He began to regret his decision to refuse the Inquisitor’s offer for the Blue Lyrium but the Qunari hadn’t offered again and Samson wasn’t sure he would try to; he seemed the type to want to respect Samson’s sober wishes even if it meant watching him beg when the Thirst took his mind.

 

The Blue had been nothing like this. At its worst, the Thirst had made him sob, bones brittle and jagged beneath his skin, so sensitive it felt like every pump of his heart was sending broken glass through his veins. At its worst he had been unable to even crawl through the choke damp to his Dust dealers, unable to do anything but shiver and shake under the stairs by the docks and pray for death from a the Maker who had abandoned him. 

 

Samson almost longed for that feeling now.

 

He should have expected it. The Red Lyrium was _fire_. Too much of it at once had blistered the skin of his men, had set them aflame and burned them up before the crystal took over their bodies. When he had donned the armor inlaid so expertly by Maddox with Lyrium he had felt his entire body combust, bones turning molten beneath his skin and blood aflame, a metal to be hammered and tempered and forged into something greater. 

 

The Lyrium burned in him still, dripping sweat until the cot was soaked beneath his abraded skin and rubbing him raw. Had he the strength, Samson would have dragged himself into the snow to try and soothe the fire in his flesh, but he could do nothing but sink his teeth into his palm until he tasted blood to bite back the howl of pain that wanted to emerge with every hitch of breath, every thought, until his mind went blissfully blank beneath the white-hot heat of it. 

 

There were days when he his legs couldn’t stand his weight, when his spine felt ready to melt down into his boots, but his grip warped the steel bars of his cot beneath the heat and pain of his clenching fists. The sound of the wrenching metal could be heard through the heavy door and his room quickly became the one place in Skyhold everyone wanted to avoid. Even the guards posted outside, the scouts and warriors who had no doubt lost friends and family to Samson’s treachery, begged off the shift. 

 

The Inquisitor sent the Seeker to his broom closet and though it was obvious she had been ordered there, her hard-lined face softened as she took in the pathetic sight of him, weeping on the bed as his body and mind burned. She had a gift, she told him, as the Inquisitor moved to hold him down. To set the Lyrium in a mage or Templar’s body aflame. To burn it out of them, at least for awhile. It was how she had helped Rutherford survive without losing his mind to the Thirst and had his wits been about him, Samson would have scoffed that Rutherford had received so much _help_ with it all: food and shelter and the Seeker’s abilities to speed the process of clarity while he had _nothing_ and was still labelled the weaker of the two. But Samson’s mind was slipping, liquid metal sloshing in his head and he could barely catch sight of Rutherford leaning in the door frame before the Seeker’s hands were on him and he was arching off the bed despite the Inquisitor’s considerable strength to hold him down, despite Rutherford rushing forward to grab him, and _screaming_.

 

They didn’t try it again. You couldn’t set fire to flame. It only added to the inferno raging in Samson’s body. 

 

The Commander’s own struggles were getting worse, and Samson had the sneaking suspicion he was at least partially to blame. He knew his presence added stress to Rutherford’s already overflowing plate: concerns that he would betray them somehow, that someone would slip into the fortress to take his life, and just the general tension between the two former colleagues weighing the man down. And what was more, the Lyrium song screaming from Samson’s bones called out to Rutherford. It wasn’t like the Blue, muted and soft, alluring, but a desperate howl that resonated when Samson moved, when he breathed, and he would sometimes catch the Commander shuddering or stumbling when he was near and knew it was the cry of the song tugging at him, pushing him to fall. 

 

Rutherford’s office was in a tall tower with a broken ceiling, the mountain air allowed to sweep in and soothe Samson’s boiling skin and so, when he had enough food and water in him to propel him to his feet at least long enough to stumble across the way, he settled in a spare chair by the windowsill and slumped there, leaning against the cool stone and letting the chilled breeze blow over him like a balm to his his blistering skin. 

 

One a particularly bad day when he couldn’t keep food down, retching into a bucket every few minutes at his seat by Rutherford’s window, the Commander came slipping suddenly down the ladder from his loft and snatched the bucket from his hands just in time to be ill himself. He handed it back and slumped, exhausted, against the wall, sliding down it to the stone floor, shivering and pale. He swiped at his face and grimaced. 

 

“You know,” Samson began, chucking the contents of the bucket out the window and ignoring Rutherford’s disgusted noise of protest from his position on the floor. “I don’t think this is the kind of handling your Inquisitor had in mind.” 

 

“Fuck you,” the Commander groaned in response, and there was no heat behind the words, sliding from his place half-propped against the wall to lie sideways on the floor. The Ferelden covered his face with his clean hand to half-smother his laughter, throaty chuckles that built weakly in his chest.

 

Samson hid his own smirk behind his hand.

 

**__________**

 

It became more common for Samson have trouble keeping food down. At first he didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t unheard of with the Thirst making him too nauseous to bother with food most days though it was available to him and quietly pressed on him by the Inquisitor and later by Rutherford when he noticed, frowning, that Samson had dropped more weight from his already lanky figure. He had brushed off the Commander’s odd concern -he had seen Rutherford retching into a bucket after eating a meal and many times with his stomach empty when the Thirst was ripping at his bones. 

There was no reason for Rutherford to care what happened to Samson anyway. Though they had reached a sort of truce, Samson recognized that it was more than likely out of necessity working together in close quarters than anything genuine. Rutherford was not the man Samson had known in Kirkwall, a ball of anger and fear and hatred and though he still held no affection for the rebel mages the Inquisition had recruited, he treated them well and protected them from mage-fearing soldiers in their ranks. It was a difficult thing for him to reconcile, the Knight-Captain who had seen him thrown out of the Order and Maddox made Tranquil, with the Inquisition Commander Lyrium-sick and  _trying_. 

For his part, the Commander had stopped most of the quips and barbs. He still thought Samson a monster, Samson was sure, but when the Inquisition’s forces had returned from the Arbor Wilds, from the Emprise du Lion, and the Storm Coast, to announce that they had cleared out the rest of the Red Templars, he had seen Samson step away, ducking into an empty room to take strengthening breaths and dash at the damp collecting in his eyes. The Red Templars were monsters, what Samson had led them to was  _monstrous_ , but he had loved them and he mourned their loss. It was not what he had expected and a whisper of respect, unwanted, buried its way into his mind. 

When Samson could stomach nothing more than clear broth and water, sometimes mead or ale to dull the pain resonating from his stomach, the Inquisitor sent for his healers despite Samson’s protests that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble; they knew what it was. But he sat still on his cot, as upright as the pain would allow him to do, as a young healer knelt before him, gentle hands on his stomach and the strange rush of her magic slipping through him, seeking, cooling the heat as best she could. It still made the Lyrium in him activate, flaring to life, but the mageling pushed the heat and pain enough that he only hissed and hunched further at the sharp sting of it.

When she had finished her assessment, the mageling sat back on her heels and looked him in the eye, a soft frown crossing her face. “You should have come to us earlier, Ser Samson,” she murmured and he snorted in response. 

“Just give to me straight, kid. I knew what end the Lyrium would give me. No need to honey it.” 

The mageling frowned again and reached forward to touch his stomach  again, as if assessing one more time and hoping to find different results before speaking. “The Lyrium is solidifying in your bones and your organs. It has started in your stomach, which is why you are having trouble eating. The pain in your joints is the calcification in your bones.” She moved her hand up his chest. “The spread of the Lyrium is beginning to move upwards, to your lungs. You will begin to have trouble breathing if you haven't already."

 

Samson nodded as if the mageling had told him they were having lamb for supper instead of detailing what was likely to be a painful demise. Their original assessment when he had been given to the Commander had been a few months to a year. From what the kid was telling him was going on in his body, he very much doubted he'd have that much time.  "How long do I have?"

 

The kid hesitated again, eyes downcast and focused on her hands against his chest. "We can give you elfroot, as much as you need. The Inquisition's team of healers is well-trained. We can make you comfortable as much as we can-"

 

Cutting the mageling off with a wave of his hand, Samson asked again. "How long do I have?" He didn't need the flowery words and promises of comfort. What she had told him was already better than he had expected.

 

When the healer hesitated a moment longer he wanted to reach out and shake her, but she met his eyes again and there was a sadness there he had not expected to find. "You have a matter of weeks, if that. If you cannot eat and cannot breathe..." She trailed off a moment but held his gaze. "The Lyrium will likely kill you before it reaches your heart and if it somehow does not, it will certainly stop and solidify your heart."

 

Samson considered the magelings words for a few long minutes while she continued to pulse healing magic through his stomach and bones, softer to soothe the angry red of the Lyrium growing there. "Thanks for you honesty, kid. I appreciate it." He motioned for her to stop the flood of magic and go on her way.

 

Later Rutherford would find Samson in his usual chair by the window, eyes closed as the breeze filled the room. He set a thick-glassed bottle of mead on the windowsill and tugged his chair up to join him and Samson knew the healer had told him the prognosis.

 

Faking a scowl he swiped the bottle and took a pull as long as he dared with his stomach solid with Lyrium. "Your little magelings have big mouths," he grumbled and the Commander hummed in agreement, letting Samson take another drink before reaching out a hand for the bottle.

 

The traded the mead back and forth silently until it was almost empty, watching the mountains cut across the darkening skyline and it was Rutherford who eventually broke the easy silence that had filled the space between them.

 

"I can't believe I'm saying this, Raleigh," and Samson could have laughed because Rutherford had  _never_ called him Raleigh even in their early days as roommates in the Gallows of Kirkwall, "but I think I am going to miss you when the Lyrium takes you." The Commander paused for a moment but Samson did not reply and he went on. "I am sorry that there's nothing to be done. I hope it is gentler than you are expecting."

 

And Samson did laugh at that, low and rough, "You're the only one, Rutherford. I'm sure everyone else is eager to dance on my grave. The death of the Red General should be anything but gentle, don't you think?"

 

But Rutherford - _Cullen_ \- wasn't laughing and his amber eyes held a pitiless sorrow that Samson wasn't sure how to deal with. Pity was easy - it made him angry, as angry as he could manage to be with his mind and body slipping away and solidifying inside. The genuine sorrow at his loss was foreign to Samson and it made him uncomfortable even through the warmth of the mead dulling his senses. He could not think of a response to that look in the Commander's eye.

 

"Everyone deserves to be mourned," Cullen murmured at his side, and Samson wondered if he was thinking of Meredith's end, her statue still in the Gallows Courtyard, and who could have mourned her.

 

**__________**

 

Though the Inquisitor had told him in those first few weeks at Skyhold that they had buried his Maddox, given him a proper end and a place to be mourned, Samson had yet to visit his grave. He knew his friend was dead with a clarity that was painful but there such a finality in seeing the marker for his grave that Samson wasn't sure he was prepared to handle. _Ever the coward,_ Samson thought to himself. _Even in his last days. Ever the coward._

 

But movement was getting steadily more difficult as the Red slipped into the cracks and joints of his bones and hardened there and he found himself short of breath from short trips down Skyhold's agonizing flights of stairs. There were things that needed to be said to Maddox before it wasn't an option. _Goodbyes_ that needed to be said.

 

And so Samson set off early one morning, before Cullen had descended from his loft to ask questions about where he was going or -Maker forbid- offer to join him, and made his slow pained way across the grounds to the little cemetery the Inquisition had built for its fallen. The Inquisitor had, unprompted, described to him where the burial grounds were located and where within it Maddox's tomb marker would be. It was just a small stone on the hillside overlooking the mountains, an _M_ carefully carved into it by the Inquisitor himself, as he did for all those who had given their lives in service to the Inquisition.

 

The graves of were covered in an array of flowers, planted there by Skyhold’s resident spirit turned boy, Cole, the Inquisitor had told him. He had avoided the kid like he had the Blight the moment the Inquisitor had given him warning of the boy’s unique abilities to look into people’s minds and their hearts and speak the truths he found there. There were things inside Samson he didn’t need spoken to him aloud.

 

Maddox’s grave was a little off to the side from the others and Samson was glad of it as he sat, gingerly, with his back to the stone and let his head roll back to rest against it. The area was quiet, beautiful, and above them in the crisp mountain air the cries of birds echoed. Absurdly, Samson thought that Maddox would have liked it there, once upon a time, when he could appreciate the flight of the birds above as he had sitting in his room in the Gallows tower and dreamt of freedom. Surrounded by flowers, like Mea would have planted had none of this ever happened. Samson hadn’t thought of the bright girl with the flower shop in years. Though Samson had long stopped picturing Maddox’s life had he not been born a mage but the image rushed back to him as he eased down, gingerly, with his back against the stone marking the place Maddox had been laid to rest. 

 

There was so much he wanted to say to Maddox that he hadn’t in life. So much he needed to _apologize_ for but as he sat there, knowing the bones of the boy he had loved for so long were beneath him, the words wouldn’t come. Samson rolled his neck, head falling back to rest against the stone at his back and he closed his eyes, trying to find a modicum of peace in the gentle morning air, the birds singing in the sunlight above him the scream of the Lyrium-song muted only the the gaping chasm that had opened in his chest at being there.

 

“I should never have carried those letters for you,” Samson murmured finally, the words wrenching from him like pulling a deep-set crystal free from stone. “I should never have kept that damned paper bird.” It was what had sealed the deal, he knew, as he reached a hand up to clasp the steel bird Maddox had made him those months ago. The Inquisitor had, miraculously, let him keep it despite owing him no favors after everything he had done and the kinder sentence he did not deserve. It was Maddox’s words, his _love_ in his handwriting stowed away in Samson’s quarters that had convinced the Knight-Commander that Samson and Maddox had begun a _relationship_ , that Maddox had ensnared Samson in a blood-magic cage and corrupted him when the boy had no idea of Samson’s traitorous heart. 

 

“I should have made you leave Kirkwall after the explosion when the other mageling survivors were getting out. I should have _pushed_ you to go.” The mages who had been escaping the ruins of Kirkwall in the aftermath of the destruction of the Chantry and the Right of Annulment did not like Tranquil but if Samson had pressured them, begged them even, they would not have turned him down. Tranquil made mages nervous but they were still _mages_ and they still needed to be protected from Templars.

 

He should never had made the deal with Corypheus, accepting the Red Lyrium and sending his men careening toward their deaths. The Chantry was _wrong_ and it needed to be burned away, ripped out by the roots, but what he had risked and what he had lost… It had been a gamble he was never going to win; Thrask had always said he was shit at cards. 

 

“I think you knew, didn’t you?” He whispered, voice breaking. “Why I couldn’t send you away?” Maddox had always said he was irrational, especially where Maddox was concerned. The boy couldn’t _feel_ love anymore but that didn’t mean he couldn’t recognize it. Samson’s quiet devotion, his desperate attempts to keep his friend safe, overbearingly so. Maddox had known what it meant and allowed Samson to continue his quiet pining, his aching love, in silence. 

 

There were no tears left in Samson, burned up by the Lyrium that filled his body and still somehow left him feeling so very hollow, but he sat against Maddox’s tomb and apologized to him in sharp gasps and dry sobs, “I’m sorry, I’m _so_ sorry, Maddox. For _everything,”_ until his voice gave out and the sun was high in the sky. 

 

Samson should have expected that Cullen would come looking for him when he awoke to find Samson missing from the fortress. Samson watched him, dull-eyed and empty and aching, as the Ferelden climbed the hill in steady strides and looked down at him with a mixture of sorrow and understanding. He reached out a hand and, sniffling, Samson accepted it and allowed himself to be carefully lifted from the ground. He made the Commander pause for a moment, and help him lean back down to press a kiss to the top of the stone marking Maddox’s final resting place. 

 

They made their way slowly back to Skyhold, Samson leaning heavily against Cullen’s side, the Commander carrying almost his full weight as the stress of the day and the position sapped the remainder of his strength and the air in his rapidly crystalizing lungs. 

 

“You loved him.” It wasn’t a question Cullen murmured as they reached the base of the hill. 

 

Samson looked back over his shoulder at the place where Maddox’s grave stood and Cullen paused to let him. 

 

“I _love_ him. Him being dead doesn’t change anything.” 

 

**__________**

 

Samson wasn’t sure he believed in the Maker anymore. After everything, after watching the abuses perpetuated by the Maker’s church against its mages and Templars, the Maker’s children, after meeting the first Magister to walk into the Fade and turn the Golden City black. If He did exist, He wasn’t the kind and loving Maker Samson had been taught when he was young. But _something_ had to happen when you died. Even through his faltering faith and disbelief, Samson had to think there was _something_ afterwards. Maybe not for him but for people who were good.

 

If anyone deserved to wake up warm and content, to walk by the Maker’s side and bask in His soft Light for all eternity, it was Maddox. The Tranquil were cut off from their magic and emotions, from their dreams and the Fade itself. No one had ever told him, even when he was a young and naive man of Faith, what happened to mages and Tranquil when they died. Were those bearing the Maker’s Curse accepted at his side when they passed so long as they were Good in life? What of those who had the Curse forcibly removed like the Tranquil? 

 

The red Lyrium spread quickly, mere weeks like the young healer had warned. It wasn’t long after Samson’s visit to Maddox’s resting place that he awoke one morning unable to feel his legs, unable to get them to respond to his commands. He had shouted his panic and when the healers came they found his spine to be quietly fusing with Red. It wouldn’t be long. 

 

The Inquisitor had him moved then from the windowless broom closet to Cullen’s office, positioned on a cot near the window where he could watch the birds soar outside. The healers brought him elfroot mixtures, carefully cupping his head and tilting the liquid down his throat, laying their magic-cooled hands on his too-warm skin to take the worst of the pain. He had no stomach for anything thicker than the elfroot-water and his breath came shallow and slow, rattling in his crystal lungs. 

 

The Inquisitor visited often, when he could spare the time, but Cullen was his most constant companion. Strange that the Ferelden he had spent the better part of a decade hating would be there in his final days. Samson sent him away when the hovering became too much, telling the Commander to fetch some mead and they would have themselves one last drink and Cullen complied despite knowing that Samson wouldn’t be able to keep such a rich thing down. 

 

Watching the birds in his blessed moment of quiet, Samson almost didn’t notice the rattle and wheeze of his own breath slowing to a crawl, mind slipping away from him, already soaring with the birds and slowly, tenderly, bringing his good hand up to wrap his fingers around Maddox’s steel bird. He brought it up with shaking fingers enough to press a kiss to the pendant. 

 

He didn’t deserve to walk in the Maker’s Light, he knew, but if he could see Maddox just one more time it would be enough. 

 

And then Samson closed his eyes and drifted into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not super satisfied with this chapter partially because I literally hate Cullen and it was really hard for me to try and reconcile them??? I'm sorry???
> 
> ALSO I'M SORRY SAMSON BUT YOU HAD TO DIE.
> 
>  
> 
> If you're sitting there thinking "Kit this is fucking weird" that's because I am incapable of writing anything other than vignettes.


End file.
